The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

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In This Edition (10 minute read)

• How the heat and the cold cause millions of avoidable deaths each year and some ideas for preventing those deaths

• The Idea List, which explores drinkable sewage water, AI and 911 call takers, altered blood types for donor kidneys, edible utensils, and energy from ocean waves

• The adjacent possible

It feels like there’s a new record-breaking heat wave every week these days. Whether in the U.S., Europe, or China, extreme heat draws attention because of its deadliness and connection to climate change. The media attention is warranted; according to a recent report from the UN’s climate panel, the frequency and intensity of heat waves will continue to increase across the globe. And heat exposure can be deadly.

What’s interesting is that many more people die from cold exposure every year, but it seems like nobody cares about that side of the thermometer. In this post, I want to acknowledge the danger of the heat, but I also want to shed light on the overlooked danger of the cold. And because temperature-related deaths are so avoidable, I want to explore ways to prevent them from happening.

Heat is bad, but cold deserves more attention

It can be difficult to link deaths with heat and cold because of the sometimes-indirect nature of temperature-related deaths. Heat and cold can lead to direct illnesses like heat stroke and hypothermia, or they can cause complications from underlying health conditions, which aren’t always recorded as temperature-related deaths. Because of this challenge, researchers try to calculate the number of temperature-related deaths in many different ways, leading to varied estimates of just how deadly heat and cold are. But while the estimates vary, one thing is consistent: the cold is responsible for many more deaths than the heat.

Some researchers use death certificates to estimate temperature-related deaths. One report from the National Center for Health Statistics estimated 2,000 weather-related deaths in the U.S. each year from 2006 to 2010. Using death certificates to link deaths to specific weather, the report’s authors found that about 63% of the deaths came from cold exposure, 31% from heat exposure, and 6% from floods, storms, or lightning. This would mean that (in the U.S.): (1) heat and cold cause 15 times more deaths than floods, storms, and lightning, and (2) cold causes twice as many deaths as the heat.

Since they used death certificates, the report’s authors acknowledge that 2,000 deaths might be an undercount. While heat stroke and hypothermia would show up on death certificates, information related to temperature might not get recorded in cases where death is indirectly caused by heat or cold. Still, the report gives a helpful baseline for direct temperature-related deaths in the U.S.

Other researchers try to account for indirect temperature-related deaths. The Lancet published a series of research papers looking at excess deaths on abnormally hot and cold days globally. In these papers, causes of death could include cardiorespiratory and metabolic diseases as well as homicide and transport-related injuries.

Each paper finds that deaths from the cold outnumber deaths from the heat across the globe, and it’s not even close; cold deaths outnumber heat deaths by 17 times in a 2015 study, 9 times in a 2021 study, and 4 times in another 2021 study. Despite these results, media attention focused almost exclusively on heat deaths; even The Lancet’s own article describing one of the studies was titled “Health in a world of extreme heat.”

In study after study, the cold is responsible for many more deaths than the heat, but that doesn’t mean we should discard the heat as a problem. If anything, the studies suggest that we should be taking deaths from both heat and cold much more seriously. Of the two latest Lancet studies, one estimated 5.1 million temperature-related deaths per year globally (4.6 million from the cold and 0.5 million from the heat); the other estimated 1.7 million (1.35 million from the cold and 0.35 million from the heat). This doesn’t mean that millions of people are freezing or overheating to death each year; they might be dying indirectly from heat or cold, whether of underlying health issues or something else. Regardless, millions of people across the world die from heat and cold each year. And since the U.S. makes up only a few thousand of those deaths, the problem is much more pronounced abroad.

A problem causing that much harm is surely worth examining and mitigating, both globally and at home!

Preventing deaths from heat and cold

Here’s what we know so far:

• Millions of people across the world die from heat and cold each year

• Most temperature-related deaths are due to the cold

• Most temperature-related deaths happen outside of the U.S.

In a world facing more frequent days with extreme temperatures and rising energy costs, we need to help people protect themselves from temperature-related death.

Increasing access to clean in-home heating and cooling. Air conditioner ownership is more than 90% in the U.S. and Japan, but it’s less than 5% in sub-Saharan Africa and less than 10% in India, despite those regions having twice as many days where cooling is needed. And 40% of the world’s population (about 3 billion people) doesn’t have access to electricity or gas, instead using “solid fuels” like wood, coal, and even crop waste to heat their homes and cook their food.

Burning solid fuels at home creates toxic indoor air pollution, which is estimated to cause millions of deaths per year. It’s possible that many of the cold deaths observed in The Lancet studies are due to indoor air pollution in homes heated with solid fuels! Can we find in-home heating and cooling solutions that (1) don’t cost much, (2) don’t cause significant air pollution, and (3) don’t require electricity or gas? Perhaps homes could be smartly designed to naturally increase airflow or retain heat. Or perhaps we could provide cheap blankets and warm clothing to people who need them.

But better access to in-home heating and cooling units comes at the cost of increased energy consumption. We’ve seen this firsthand in the U.S.: a heat wave in California recently put incredible strain on their power grid, and a series of winter storms in 2021 caused a massive power outage and dozens of deaths in Texas. The perfect in-home heating and cooling solution combines low cost with low energy consumption. Startups and researchers are already working on more efficient heating and cooling devices, but they likely won’t be cheap in the short-term.

Designing cities to be temperature-adaptive. Several U.S. cities are experimenting with ways to keep their citizens cool during heat waves. Some are experimenting with more reflective roofs and pavements, which can reduce temperatures by 5 degrees and make it feel 15 degrees cooler. Other cities are introducing cooling centers with air conditioning, water, and social services; they come in the form of shipping containers or networks of churches and libraries. But such interventions are concentrated in the U.S. and designed to combat the heat. Can we come up with equivalent interventions for the cold? Can we help bring such interventions to others in the global community?

Changing the weather with science. China is taking another route when it comes to fighting the heat: shooting stuff into the clouds to make it rain. Called cloud seeding, the technique uses particles to attract water droplets, increasing the chance that rain will fall. The science behind cloud seeding is uncertain, but it got me thinking about other ways we could manipulate the weather. What if we could induce a constant breeze on a hot day? Or minimize cloud coverage on a cold day? Or reduce the wind chill on a cold day?

The Idea List

🚰 Turn sewage water into drinking water

As droughts become more common and more severe, we will have to find creative ways to conserve and reuse water. Water from our toilets, showers, and sinks might have to get reused someday, so I fully support any early efforts working to make that possible. People are also using sewage water to make beer, and apparently it’s pretty tasty.

📞 Use AI to relieve 911 call taker shortages

I’ve written previously about burnout among 911 call takers. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a 911 call center. Sure enough, their biggest struggle by far is staffing. I learned that many call centers are so desperate for call takers that they’re using AI to handle non-emergency calls. In a future where nothing changes about the job description and working conditions of 911 call takers, you might just be talking to a robot when you call 911.

🩸 Increase kidney donations by changing the blood type of donor kidneys

There are almost 90,000 people on the waitlist for a kidney donation in the U.S., and about 5,000 people die each year waiting for a kidney. I am particularly excited about the potential of technology to decrease the number of people on the waitlist, whether through lab-grown or (as in this article) lab-modified kidneys. In this particular case, scientists discovered a way to change the blood type of donor kidneys, making them universally compatible. This technique could be a big win for ethnic minorities, who make up a significant portion of people on the waitlist but a much lower portion of donors, meaning that they’re much less likely to find a match.

🍴 Replace single-use plastic utensils with edible ones

We can all agree that single-use plastic is bad for the environment, but paper straws are a terrible alternative. Maybe a strawberry-flavored, sugar-based straw wouldn’t be much better, but I’m rooting for the people trying to bring edible utensils, plates, and cups to the mainstream. It’s already normal to eat a waffle cone with ice cream; what if it was normal to eat a cookie cup with coffee or a black pepper spoon with soup?

🌊 Harness power from the motion of the ocean

A new project from ARPA-E wants to use ocean waves as a renewable energy source. This isn’t a new idea; for a long time, scientists have believed that waves could be a great source of renewable energy. However, working in the ocean is expensive and difficult, and it’s been harder than expected to design a turbine that captures wave power effectively. The SHARKS project hopes to break through those barriers and provide an economically viable way to harness the power of waves.

One Last Thing: The Adjacent Possible

This month, I listened to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From on audiobook, and I was fascinated by his discussion of a concept called ‘the adjacent possible.’

This quote from Steven Johnson’s newsletter captures how I like to think about it:

“In terms of technology, there’s simply no way to invent a microwave oven in 1650, however smart you might be. But somehow, in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of a microwave oven became imaginable, became part of the adjacent possible.”

The adjacent possible is the set of possibilities, given the current state of the world. It would have been impossible to invent the microwave in 1650 because the invention of the microwave was dependent on other inventions and ideas. Once those ideas came into existence, the invention of microwave was just a matter of putting them together. New ideas are just combinations of existing ideas!

When it comes to my interest in thinking about new ideas, it’s important to expand my adjacent possible. By listening to podcasts, reading articles, and writing newsletters, I’m building up a bank of ideas that I can put together in other contexts to create new ideas. Now that I know about edible utensils, for instance, I can keep that idea in my back pocket until it becomes relevant in another context. Of course, many of the ideas I find will never be useful, but I’m hoping to overcome the long odds with quantity.

Until next time,

Noah

Previous Editions

If you liked this post, you might like these:

• #011: Putting fewer kids in foster care

• #010: Repurposing empty church space

• #006: Relieving burnout in 911 call takers

You can also check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

Subscribe for free to stay up to date and support my work.

Subscribe now

In This Edition (7 minute read)

• How we might actually put too many kids in foster care due to the murkiness of ‘child neglect’

• The Idea List, which explores names for heat waves, cold waves (?), rats with backpacks, nuclear reactors in space, and medical debt

• A haboob on video

I’ll probably write multiple posts on child welfare because it’s so important and yet seemingly so overlooked. Negative childhood experiences are costly to the child, but they’re also costly to society because they can cascade into other social problems. For example, childhood abuse increases a child’s future risk of physical and mental health problems, homelessness, and involvement in the criminal justice system. Kids are the future of our society, so we should be making strong investments in the safety, health, and education of our kids. Unfortunately, many of our systems for child welfare leave much to be desired.

This post is about the foster care system, which is supposed to care for kids who can’t live with their families because of abuse, neglect, incapacitation, or abandonment. According to the most recent federal data, there are 407,000 kids in foster care. From October 2020 to September 2021, 216,000 kids entered foster care; and 224,000 exited foster care, with 62% having spent over a year in the system.

A foster home shortage creates further trauma for foster kids

The kids who touch this system have experienced immense loss and trauma already, and most of them will stay in the system for an extended length of time. It should be the duty of our foster care system to provide a safe home during this difficult period, but a foster home shortage means that many foster kids will only face further trauma in foster care. They’ll be separated from their siblings, placed in group homes and institutions, and spend time miles away from loved ones. The situation is worse for many others: with no homes for incoming kids, foster care agencies across the country have been forced to send kids out of state or put kids in hotels and on office building floors.

As I’ve learned more about the foster care system, I’ve struggled to wrap my head around the fact that we’re willing to take a child from their supposedly unsafe home, only to put them into a system that clearly struggles to give them a much better place to stay. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t remove children from their families when they’re brutally abused. It’s just that many foster kids are removed for much less. There is a foster home shortage, it’s causing bad experiences for foster kids, and we need to fix it. But what if that shortage is being amplified because we’re taking too many kids away from their families?

A lot of kids are removed from their families for ‘neglect only’

It turns out that many foster kids are removed from their families because of neglect, not abuse; and it’s neglect that’s at the root of my question. According to the Children’s Bureau, there were 656,000 victims of child maltreatment in 2019. Of those victims, 62% didn’t face physical, sexual, or psychological abuse at all; they were victims of neglect only. While only about a quarter of child maltreatment victims will end up in foster care, a report on foster children tells a similar story about neglect among foster child removal reasons. The chart below details removal reasons for kids entering care between September 2020 and October 2021. 

As you can see, physical and sexual abuse are associated with 13% and 4% of removals, respectively, while neglect is associated with 64% of removals. We have to be careful because the categories overlap, meaning that some of the 64% could be neglect and another removal reason. Still, neglect is so prevalent that it’s likely the main removal reason for a sizable number of foster children.

What if many ‘neglect only’ cases shouldn’t result in removal?

The definition of child neglect differs by state, but it generally refers to a failure to provide certain needs of the child, like food, clothing, shelter, medical attention, and education. Obviously, we want to make sure children have their basic needs met, but the response needs to be appropriate. Definitionally, child neglect overlaps with child poverty quite a bit, and my worry is that many instances of “child neglect” should not result in a removal. It’s one thing if a parent is willfully refusing to care for their child, but it’s another if a parent is trying and needs help. For a family in the latter category, the problem would be solved by providing the help, not taking away the child.

Removals don’t come without costs; (1) they inflict trauma on the child by separating them from their family and (2) they require the foster care system to find a place for them to stay. If we’re removing kids that don’t need to be removed, we’re traumatizing kids for no reason and putting stress on a system that’s already busting at the seams.

If I were king, I would call for an audit of all child removals for neglect only. My goal would be to understand how many of these cases are justified. The audit may find that the system makes good decisions most of the time; maybe we already provide families with resources to prevent removals and remove kids only in serious cases. Or it could find that 40,000 child removals each year could be eliminated by giving families food, clothes, and shelter. With the reduction in foster kids overall, maybe we’d do a better job placing the foster kids we do have, instead of putting them in hotels and on office building floors.

The Idea List

🥵 Name heat waves so that people take them more seriously

Heat waves are happening more and more these days. When you think of dangerous weather, you might not think of heat waves, but apparently they’re responsible for the most yearly deaths of any weather category in the United States. Naming them could bring more public attention to an overlooked weather category.

🥶 Or maybe name…cold waves?

This study estimates about 1.7 million deaths globally from extreme heat and cold in 2019, but 1.4 million were related to the cold. Weirdly, the entire article and almost all of the press on extreme temperature deaths is about the heat. Clearly, extreme heat is dangerous, but are we overlooking a bigger problem because it doesn’t fit within the narrative of climate change and increasing temperatures?

🐀 Train rats to find earthquake survivors

This program straps backpacks with location trackers and microphones on rats so that search-and-rescue teams can find survivors under earthquake rubble. The article gave me a new appreciation for rats, which are also being trained to sniff out diseases and find landmines.

🚀 Launch nuclear reactors into space

Finding better power sources for our spacecraft will be crucial to long-distance space travel and long-term human presence on other planetary bodies. Apparently, nuclear power is one of the more promising alternative fuel sources for space, but regulation has held it up for decades (In the 1980s, a Soviet nuclear reactor de-orbited and sent radioactive debris over Canada). A new directive made it possible for a startup called Atomos Space to test their reactor in orbit, which could serve as a proof-of-concept for regulatory-safe nuclear power in space.

👨‍⚕️ Shed light on the devastating effects of medical debt

Medical debt puts financial stress on families and blocks patients from getting the care they need. Our nation has a healthcare cost problem, and this article sheds some light on the devastating implications. According to the poll, 63% of adults with medical debt cut spending on food, clothing, and other basics due to their debt; 48% used up all or most of their savings; and 17% declared bankruptcy or lost their home.

One Last Thing: Haboobs

This month, I learned that New Mexico has these things called haboobs, which are basically giant dust storms with a hilarious name. They’re incredibly scary-looking, but apparently you can drive through them and not die. Here’s a video of a “monster, epic haboob.” At around 2:20, they drive around inside of it. At around 4:00, you can watch a time lapse of the haboob moving straight over a town.

Until next time,

Noah

Previous Editions

If you liked this edition, you might like a past edition:

• #010: Repurposing empty church space

• #006: Relieving burnout in 911 call takers

• #005: Keeping outer space usable

You can also check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other big social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

Subscribe for free to stay up to date and support my work.

Subscribe now

In This Edition (9 minute read)

• How underutilized church space could provide essential services to local communities

• The Idea List, which explores smart guns, floating cities, hearing uncommon perspectives, virtual reality for chronic pain, and time travel

• Why I’m embracing my lack of expertise when it comes to creative thinking

My mom runs her preschool out of a church. Her school takes up the Sunday school wings of a building that boasts several thousand square feet. When I visit or help out at the school, I’m always struck by how much space the church has – and how much space it doesn’t use. For all its real estate, the church has only a dozen or so regular members. The sanctuary is its largest room by far, but it sits empty, even on Sundays, unless my mom uses it for indoor recess.

It wasn’t always this way. This church used to have a bustling membership decades ago, and it would even put on big community events like drive-in movies. But its story of decline and disuse isn’t unique. Drive down any highway or back road in Michigan and you’ll see churches everywhere, their landscaping immaculate but their buildings empty outside of Sunday.

It turns out that empty space is top of mind for many churches right now. As overall church membership has declined, churches have faced increasing financial pressure. Thousands of churches are forced to close each year, and those that remain have more space than they know what to do with and an acute need to generate revenue. For the thousands of new churches that start each year, it might be possible to stay afloat through donations; religious giving has been increasing. But a growing movement of thinkers and leaders is warning churches to diversify their income so that they aren’t so reliant on tithing.

With so many churches teetering on closure or looking for new ways to raise funds, it seemed to me that there could be an exciting opportunity to think radically about the use of empty church space. What if there was a win-win, helping churches to generate revenue streams while providing essential services to their communities? Imagine helping local small businesses with cheap access to kitchens and office space, or providing short term shelter for local foster kids, or sponsoring programs to combat loneliness among the local elderly, or bringing affordable childcare to their community.

I wanted to hear how churches were thinking about adaptive reuse, so I talked to and visited a bunch of churches in Chicagoland. In my conversations, I learned that there are a whole host of barriers to unlocking underutilized church space. Several things came up over and over again.

Lack of demand. From what I heard, there’s no shortage of people asking to use empty church space, but space users aren’t willing or able to pay much. They want to use the space for their nonprofit board meetings or choir practice, not for lucrative, ongoing partnerships or projects. Of course, churches want to help out local organizations that need the space, but they want to make their space work for their financial situation as well.

Lack of capital. Many church buildings haven’t been updated in decades, and others are in disrepair. Since they don’t have much money in the bank, they’re stuck with space that is undesirable or straight-up unusable. One church told me that they couldn’t rent out space on their second or third floors because their building wasn’t compliant with the American Disabilities Act. Since they didn’t have money for an elevator, they had to let several rooms sit empty, even though they might otherwise be desirable to a nearby university or local businesses.

Lack of ideas. There are many examples of churches that managed to find interesting uses for their space. Churches have turned their spaces into an incubator for small business, a co-working space, and even a brewery. But the churches I talked to didn’t have a clear sense for the needs of the community, so they struggled to come up with creative uses for their space beyond food pantries. Some churches wouldn’t consider certain uses since they didn’t match up with the mission. For instance, one has been hesitant to rent their space to fraternities or sororities, and another would only rent their sanctuary to music groups. Even if they had ideas that fit within the mission, a lack of capital and desirable space severely limits the possibilities.

Legal concerns. Churches were nervous about the headaches that come with renting out their space, namely liability and taxes. For people who are strapped for time and money, the benefits of renting out space didn’t clearly outweigh the costs of getting insured or getting sued. And even if they did rent out their space, they told me that their tax bill would increase in proportion to the square footage of the rented space, which meant that they could actually lose money in a rental deal.

So, I learned that adaptive reuse of church space is complicated. As I’ve mentioned already, there are plenty of one-off churches who have cracked the code, but scalable solutions are hard since every church has different constraints. Still, there are smart people making progress.

For example, Bricks and Mortals and Missional Wisdom Foundation provide the help and connections to take churches through the entire process of adaptive reuse. Their work is exciting, but I worry that such a hands-on approach will be hard to scale. I’m hopeful about a new program through Bricks and Mortals will take learnings from the hands-on work to create a toolkit that will be usable for churches nationwide.

Faith and Finance is taking a different approach, training church leaders in business decision making. Most of the church leaders I talked to are bi-vocational, but very few had formal business training. If a lot of church space is empty because church leaders don’t know how to navigate legal concerns or financing options, business training is a great way to unlock some church space.

With the success of Airbnb, it seems like technology could play a vital role in scaling a solution to adaptive use. Platforms like ChurchSpace are trying to provide an easy way for churches to rent out their space online. I have no idea how successful these efforts have been, but I’d love to see a successful “Churchbnb” someday.

Churches need money and own a ton of real estate, and that space could be generating revenue and helping communities. Filling that space is more complex than coming up a few good ideas, but having a few good ideas could inspire churches to overcome the legal and financial concerns. Do you have ideas for using empty church space? Let me know!

The Idea List

🔫 Reduce gun deaths with smart guns (again)

Recent events have brought this country’s gun violence crisis to the forefront. Two months ago, I shared an article on smart guns as an idea for combatting gun deaths. While this solution wouldn’t have stopped the Buffalo or Uvalde shootings, it would bring a layer of security to guns so that they can’t be fired by children or other unauthorized users. The above article also links to a poll that suggests 55% of gun owners support the development of smart guns!

🌆 Make cities more adaptable with buildings that float in the air

This might be dumb, but I got excited about the possibility that city buildings could be movable. Cities are going to be forced to deal with big changes due to COVID and climate change. It would be great if we could just move Southern coastal cities away from the ocean because all the buildings were basically big balloons. Or take vacant buildings, which are really bad for violence; imagine if there were no vacant buildings because we could move them to storage when demand doesn’t keep up.

📺 Hear uncommon perspectives on this YouTube channel

Soft White Underbelly interviews criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and others you might not normally hear from. Listening is a great starting place for thinking about change, and this channel has hours of stories to listen to. Some of these stories can be absolutely brutal, so please watch with caution.

🥽 Alleviate chronic pain with virtual reality

This was a cool example of what I discussed in my previous posts on VR. The virtual world essentially takes enough brain power that patients aren’t feeling pain when they put on the headset. With an ever raging opioid crisis, could this be an alternative to pain medications? Or, for addicts, an alternative to heroin or fentanyl?

⏱️ Travel through time with Google Maps

Google Maps is much more than a tool to look for a nearby coffee shop or find your way to a friend’s house. This article talks about a new feature within Street View that lets you browse past Street View photos using a time slider. My team looked at blocks in Chicago over time to map retail vacancies caused by COVID, but I’ve been thinking that there must be other ways to use this feature. Any ideas?

One Last Thing: Thinking Unreasonably

My job requires me to think about problems that I know little about. It can be hard to look at big issues like foster care or homelessness and feel like I can come with anything new and interesting. But recently I’ve been trying to reframe my lack of expertise as a strength when it comes to creative thinking.

James Clear talked about being a beginner in his newsletter: "The gift of a beginner is fresh eyes. The longer you're in a field, the harder it is to perceive new truths. Your mind is biased toward refining what you're already doing instead of exploring fresh terrain. Take your expertise and apply it to something new."

And about 8 minutes into this interview, Noubar Afeyan (co-founder of Moderna) had this to say on exploring new ideas: “It starts as an act of imagination. It is not an act of reason…We need to be unreasonable so that we come up with leaps that eventually seem reasonable.” 

Being new to a problem gives me license to think unreasonably; my imagination can run freely since I’m not constrained by expertise. And sure, a bunch of my naive ideas seem stupid after I dig into them, and I certainly work hard to poke holes in my ideas and refine them. But rather than feeling paralyzed by my lack of expertise on these big problems, I’m going to tap into my imagination and my naivety, because it might just mean that I’ll think of something that no expert would have dared to think. And that might be where the good stuff is.

Until next time,

Noah

Previous Editions

You can check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

Today’s edition is about a 11-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:

• This is the last of three posts about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. In this post, I’ll share a few reflections and talk about some other interesting applications of VR.

• Over the course of this project, we struggled to come up with clear ideas for making an impact. We thought that VR could be a great tool for education, but we didn’t have any strong ideas for how or what our role would be. Any ideas that we did come up with were expensive and outside of our expertise. In future projects, it will be important to have a clear proposal for an idea or partnership. We also need to ask ourselves what we bring to the table with the problem; how will our presence materially move things forward?

• Even though we ultimately put this project on ice, I spent a lot of time thinking about the current and future state of VR. I’m excited about the possibilities, but our exploration left me with a lot of questions. What makes for a good virtual reality experience? What are the implications of more frequent VR use? When is virtual reality better than reality?

• Over the course of these posts, I’ve talked about many different use cases for VR. As I wrap up the discussion, I thought I’d share a few of my own (maybe out-there) ideas for using VR. What if we could use VR to relive moments in time? What if we could use VR to help researchers gain new intuitions in their field or experiment in ways that would be impossible or dangerous in the real world? What if we could enable safer, more visceral journalism?

• Starting next month, I’m going to put a pause on writing about my current projects and focus on writing about new ideas, hard problems, and interesting articles. You’ll hear from me less often, but it’ll be more fun this way!

This is the final post about RISC’s virtual reality project. Here’s a recap of the journey so far.

1. I had been exploring potential positive use cases of VR, and my boss sanctioned a project on it after gaining an interest separately. My own research had uncovered promising uses of VR for treating people with PTSD and addiction. And those were just the tip of the iceberg it seemed (see VR for mental health and college access). It was clear that VR had specific powers. (1) It’s immersive; it can make you feel (emotionally) like you’re somewhere you’re not. (2) It’s interactive; it can allow you to feel (physically) a virtual environment. The potential excited us, but we didn’t have a specific idea in mind or any sense for how RISC would make something happen. Read more about the initial exploration here.

2. We narrowed our focus to VR in education, but we couldn’t find a way for RISC to get involved. At its best, we thought VR could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: maybe you could become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. But we were generally underwhelmed by the state of educational VR, which prioritized field trips over interactivity. In talking to teachers, startups, and industry leaders, it was clear that educational VR was stuck on virtual field trips because of affordability and usability. We had a few different ideas for how we might get involved, but it turned out we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them. Read about our exploration into educational VR here.

In this post, I’ll share a few reflections and talk about some other interesting applications of VR.

A few reflections on the project

Over the course of this project, we struggled to come up with clear ideas for making an impact. We thought that VR could be a great tool for education, but we didn’t have any strong ideas for how or what our role would be in the implementation. It didn’t really scare us that we didn’t have ideas at the start; we hoped that we would find inspiration, problems, or partners by talking to a bunch of people. But since we didn’t come into conversations with a clear solution or a role for ourselves, we were limited in what we could accomplish. Despite a lot of excitement, people couldn’t react to anything specific, just the general idea of VR for education. We were essentially learning about market dynamics rather than iterating to a solution. In future projects, it will be important to balance talking to experts and stakeholders with having a clear proposal for an idea or partnership.

Any ideas that we did come up with were expensive and outside of our expertise. So many smart people were already working on so many things, and I think that scared me. What could we actually bring to the table when tons of people were thinking about this full-time? Short of somehow giving a VR headset to everyone in the U.S., it felt marginally impactful to spend our time in this space. Our next best bet was probably coming up with some crazy ideas for educational VR content, and we tried that. But you saw our list of ideas in my last post. In future projects, we will need to spend time thinking more clearly about what we bring to the table. How will our presence materially move things forward?

A few reflections on virtual reality

Even though we ultimately put this project on ice, I spent a lot of time thinking about the current and future state of VR. The technology has been around for decades, but the average person hasn’t been able to access or afford a good headset until recently. Now, big companies and venture capitalists are investing serious money, and I’m expecting VR to look seriously different in a few years. But it feels like virtual reality has been hyped up for years, and less than 20% of U.S. consumers tried VR in 2020. Is this thing really going to go anywhere? I’m definitely excited about the possibilities, but our exploration left me with a lot of questions.

What makes for a good virtual reality experience?

When we were trying to imagine the future of educational VR, I was struck by how hard it was to dream up good content ideas. By good, I mean content that made sense in virtual reality. As we thought of ideas, I constantly thought, “Why wouldn’t you just do this on a computer? Or in real life? I’ve come to share this article’s disposition that we don’t know what good VR looks like yet. Objects in VR look more realistic than they did, but I’m not sure we know the recipe for making compelling VR experiences (like we know how to make good horror movies or good 2D video games). VR needs an Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles to set some paradigms for the entire medium.

What are the implications of more frequent VR use?

Virtual reality is still new to the average consumer, and it’s a wild thing to experience for the first time. But imagine a future where everyone uses their VR headset every day. When the allure of virtual reality wears off and everyone knows how it works, will the immersion wear off too? Will we become desensitized to certain real world experiences because we experience them often in VR? Will we like those experiences better in VR? Nausea and eye strain are obvious physical constraints, but what other physical effects could come from using VR for, say, 8 hours a day? Will it actually correct our back problems from hunching over at the computer all day? And if we have even less reason to leave our dwellings, what will our cities and towns look like?

When is virtual reality better than reality?

Some exciting use cases outside of entertainment are emerging, especially in training (whether for surgery, customer service, or sports). You can only spend so much time practicing surgical techniques in the operating room; what if you could keep practicing from home? Companies are reporting serious performance gains from VR training, and the cost savings aren’t small either. But we should be cautious of using VR as a replacement for the real world. Virtual reality will be a cheaper and safer way to do literally everything, so the incentives will likely push its use for many things. But even if it’s cheaper to use VR for, say, job interview training in prisons, should we not strive for real people to conduct those trainings? Of course, VR training is better than no training, but we should carefully assess whether VR training is better than training in the real world.

As VR’s use cases extend beyond training, what metrics beyond costs and “outcomes” are important? If practice in VR makes me one hundred times better at soccer, should I bother going to real world practice with teammates? Technology and the pandemic have already driven us closer to a world where we don’t need much physical human interaction to go about our daily lives, and VR will allow us to do even less with each other physically. Is that a net good or net bad? I think it’s worth considering.

Some final ideas for virtual reality

Over the course of these posts, I’ve talked about many different use cases for VR: education, mental health, addiction, college access, and training. As I wrap up the discussion, I thought I’d share a few of my own (maybe out-there) ideas for using VR. I don’t claim that these ideas are good, but I do think they make use of VR’s unique powers.

VR for Memories

My family loves watching our old home videos from when my sister and I were kids. My parents often remark that they wish I could be “little again” for a day. Imagine a world in which we can either convert old home videos into 3D worlds or where we record our every moment through special contact lenses. What if we could use VR to essentially relive moments in time? We could experience moments not from the view of a camera but from the first-person. I have no idea what the social or mental health ramifications would be, but there would probably be some consumer demand for such a product. This developer had the same idea, and he experimented with it for himself. The half-hour YouTube video attached to the article is worth a watch.

VR for Research

Making breakthroughs in science takes incredible intuition and creativity. While computers and artificial intelligence can run simulations on a large scale, brilliant mathematicians and chemists have to imagine how the world works and devise tests for those theories. VR could be a useful tool on both fronts. Computers are limited in their ability to convey 3D models and data, but VR could let you literally walk around 3D objects. If we could provide tools for the brightest minds to visualize complex structures in math or complex molecules in chemistry, maybe they could gain new insights and generate breakthroughs at a much faster rate. Maybe we wouldn’t be limited to the mind of one genius who is able to visualize problems or solutions in ways that the rest of us can’t. Or on the other side, maybe we could run experiments in a virtual world that would be impossible or dangerous in the real world. This article mentions a few companies taking such an idea to researchers in the life sciences.

VR for Journalism

In my first post on VR, I wrote about my experience in the Oculus Quest 2 app Home After War, in which you explore a man’s home and his hometown of Fallujah, Iraq, as he tells you how things have changed since the Islamic State has left. The storytelling is done by a 360-degree camera placed in the middle of real people doing real life things, including a town meeting and a family dinner. Without any verbal or physical exchange, I felt a human connection with these people, something that I’ve never felt from watching a video (or at least it doesn’t happen so quickly). It strikes me that this medium could be a very powerful way to do journalism. Imagine learning about the situations in Ukraine or Israel not through words and videos but by actually witnessing events unfold. Drones or robot “journalists” with 360-degree cameras could move around a conflict area, interviewing people and roaming the streets. The public would have a  near first-person window into breaking news, giving them a more visceral understanding of the situation. And journalists wouldn’t have to risk their lives to cover dangerous situations. It turns out that big news organizations don’t disagree that VR has great potential for storytelling, but this use case has, like education, been limited by low adoption of VR headsets. This article discusses some of the merits and limits of VR for journalism.

Switching it up next month

Well, this concludes my series on virtual reality. And it’s been fun writing about my projects, but it’s hard to generate a post every week. Truthfully, I find it more fun to write about pie-in-the-sky ideas, like I do at the end of the month.

Starting next month, I’m going to put a pause on writing about my current projects and focus on writing about new ideas, hard problems, and interesting articles. You’ll hear from me less often, but it’ll be more fun this way!

Until then,

Noah

Today’s edition is an 11-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:

• This is the second of three posts about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. In this post, I’ll talk about our efforts to find ideas and bring them to life.

• Because there were so many ways we could imagine doing good with virtual reality, we decided to narrow our focus to one impact area: education. It made sense as a starting place given RISC’s most successful work, but we didn’t have a specific idea for how virtual reality would make an impact in education or what our role would be in doing that.

• From our experiences in the Oculus headset and our conversations with experts in the field, it was clear that virtual reality could be a great tool for learning. In the very best case, it could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: you could potentially become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. But we weren’t quite sure how, and we didn’t really know what was out there already.

• We were generally underwhelmed by the state of educational VR. Much of the content revolves around virtual field trips. Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR have gotten really good at transporting kids to virtual places and letting them look around, which kids love. But the level of interactivity is very low, and we saw that as an important dimension of learning in VR. Why just go there when you can go there and do stuff?

• We went out and talked to a bunch of teachers, startups and industry leaders to understand how they were thinking about educational VR. For a variety of reasons, few schools have VR headsets that allow for interactivity. Thus, developers have no incentive to build interactive educational content. But since there isn’t much interactive educational content, schools have no incentive to make the investment in high-powered VR headsets. So we’re stuck with virtual field trips because they’re more affordable and usable right now.

• We had a few different ideas for how we might get involved. If the barriers were content creation and classroom adoption, maybe we could catalyze one or both of those things. As it turned out, for each of our ideas, we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them. But we learned a lot along the way!

Last week, I talked about the genesis of RISC’s virtual reality project. We came into this project not with a specific idea but with a general sense that virtual reality could be used for good. When we ended last time, Steve had just commissioned the project, a stroke of luck considering I had been researching the positive uses of virtual reality on my own in the months leading up to that moment. If you want to read more about the idea and the inspiration behind it, check out last week’s post here.

Because there were so many ways we could imagine doing good with virtual reality, we decided to narrow our focus to one impact area. In truth, we didn’t spend a lot of time picking an area. I felt lucky that Steve was interested enough to let us explore a virtual reality project, so I didn’t push back when he suggested that we look at applications of VR to education. Some of RISC’s most prominent work had been in education, so it made sense as a starting place.

What’s weird about this project is that we didn’t have a specific idea for how virtual reality would make an impact in education or what our role would be in doing that. We just knew that we wanted to think about how virtual reality could help kids learn better. If we came up with any good ideas, then we’d try to figure out how to make them happen. In this post, I’ll talk about our efforts to find ideas and bring them to life.

The unique strengths of VR seemed conducive to learning

From our experiences in the Oculus headset and our conversations with experts in the field (which, again, you can read about in my last post here), it was clear that virtual reality can (1) put you in virtual contexts that feel real and (2) allow you to interact with those virtual contexts. With those powers, it could be a great tool for learning. At the very least, it could be a more engaging way to learn: you could learn about history by transporting yourself back in time rather than by reading a textbook. At the very best, it could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: you could potentially become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. How? Well, we weren’t quite sure. But we wanted to push the boundaries of possibility. 

VR is engaging and enables learning by doing, but we didn’t know the first thing about creating great educational content. And we didn’t really know what was out there already. We were by no means the first people to think about VR as a tool for learning. In fact, there had been a lot of people thinking about this already, and we knew basically nothing! So our first order of business was to understand the state of VR in education. And from there, we could figure out if and how we would get involved.

Existing educational VR was limited in quantity and use

We started our research with the Oculus Quest 2 in our office, downloading any educational app we could find. The first thing we noticed was that there wasn’t a ton of educational content, and it was difficult to find educational apps because there was no tag for “education” in the search bar. Nonetheless, we scoured the app store and found a handful of experiences. We toured the Anne Frank House, explored towns and refugee camps in Iraq, floated around the International Space Station, swam with sharks and sea turtles, and experienced the world as a blind person did. These experiences were cool, but truthfully I didn’t learn a lot.

The most notable experience was in Iraq. In this experience, you explore a man’s home and his hometown of Fallujah as he tells you how things have changed since the Islamic State has left. The most compelling part was how it was filmed. In several short scenes, your perspective comes from a 360-degree camera placed in the middle of real people doing real life things, once during a town meeting and once during a family dinner. You can’t interact with anyone, but real adults and children look back and forth between you and the situation at hand. It feels like you’re locking eye contact with them. Without any verbal or physical exchange, I felt a human connection with these people, something that I’ve never felt from watching a video (or at least it doesn’t happen so quickly). I don’t know if this is learning, but it was a visceral experience.

The Anne Frank experience felt like a tour at the museum. If the goal was to make it possible for anyone to tour the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands, then the creators did that. I don’t learn well from tours, so the experience was a bit boring. But it turns out that much of educational VR follows the trope of virtual field trips. Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR have gotten really good at transporting kids to virtual places and letting them look around. Kids apparently love this sort of content, and I’m not opposed to it. But the level of interactivity is very low, and we saw that as an important dimension of learning in VR. Why just go there when you can go there and do stuff?

From our perspective, VR had the potential to help kids learn math, science, or reading, not just show them what the Pyramids look like. Even in the Iraq example above, I didn’t just visit Iraq and look around; I learned something about the people and the culture by sitting amongst them. We wondered if people in the industry were trying to push educational VR in the direction of more interactivity.

Educational VR is stuck because of the economics

We went out and talked to a bunch of teachers, startups and industry leaders to understand how they were thinking about educational VR, and we heard a similar story over and over. There’s a chicken and egg problem that keeps educational VR content stuck on virtual field trips, despite an understanding that VR could potentially do much more for education.

Most kids aren’t going to use educational content unless it’s forced on them in school, but the headsets that allow for the most interactivity are the most expensive, have the least amount of content, and are the hardest to use in the classroom. While Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR are limited to virtual field trips, their headsets are much more affordable (in fact, you can do their field trips from a phone). And actually cost isn’t the only adoption inhibitor; for instance, the Oculus is hard to use in the classroom due to wifi bandwidth constraints and content not being designed for lesson plans or multi-person use. For many districts, the argument in favor of VR headsets is better student engagement rather than improved learning outcomes, and you don’t need a high-powered headset to get students engaged. For all these reasons, very few schools have high-powered VR headsets.

Since few schools have VR headsets that allow for interactivity, developers have no incentive to build interactive educational content. But since there isn’t much interactive educational content, schools have no incentive to make the investment in high-powered VR headsets. So we’re stuck on virtual field trips because they’re more usable and affordable right now.

A problem was emerging: someone needed to break the chicken and egg problem in order to spark innovation in educational VR. But was RISC really well-suited to do that?

It turns out we weren’t well-suited to do that

Thinking about how we could bridge the gap between interactive VR and the classroom, we had a few different ideas for how we might get involved. If the barriers were content creation and classroom adoption, then maybe we could catalyze one or both of those things. As it turned out, for each of our ideas, we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them.

Our first idea was pie in the sky: we would try to develop the next generation of educational VR content ourselves and try it out in some classrooms. By trying our content in some classrooms, we could test whether we were helping kids learn the material better than traditional methods. It turned out to be easy to find the classrooms willing to test out VR, and we even dreamed up a few VR lesson ideas. But when it came down to development, we didn’t feel enough conviction in any of our ideas to pursue this route. It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to make our content, and we didn’t have that kind of money. Even if we did, we would have been better off paying an amazing teacher to come up with the content ideas.

If creating our own content was out of the picture, we thought that maybe we could build lesson plans from existing interactive VR content and give lesson plans along with Oculus headsets to a few classrooms to test them out. But it turned out that David Kaser, a teacher from Barberton, Ohio, had already developed lesson plans for a bunch of existing VR apps, and an organization called foundry10 was already working on in-classroom pilots with VR and learning a lot about how to make VR more suitable for the classroom. Neither David nor foundry10 seemed to need the extra help, so we figured these ideas were in good hands.

We had other ideas, but they felt small compared to our initial aspirations. We wanted Google to provide resources to school districts so that they could find new uses for their now defunct Expeditions headsets (a problem we heard from several teachers). We wanted Meta to go on a roadshow to school districts to generate excitement for interactive VR content and learn what it would take to increase adoption. It’s hard to get big, for-profit companies to pay attention to your ideas.

In the end, it felt like we were late to the game and not a good fit for making an impact in the VR education space. Other people were far more experienced than we were and had already made far more progress than we could have made on our own. From my perspective, our only unique addition to the space would have been coming up with out-of-the-box content ideas, but meeting the team at Lighthaus gave us comfort that at least someone was pushing toward an interesting future for educational VR content. My bet is on them to lead this space.

Even though we hit a dead end with VR in education, we learned a lot about the VR industry, the education industry, and RISC’s own strengths and weaknesses. In my next post, I’ll talk about what we would have done differently and some other applications of VR I’d love to think more about.

See you then :)

Noah

Today’s edition is about a 8-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:

• Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. In this post, I’ll talk about the inspiration behind the project.

• My first exposure to doing good with virtual reality came from prisons, where people practice life skills, like using self-scan checkouts, withdrawing money from an ATM, and interviewing for a job.

• The more I researched, the more applications I found. VR had shown promise in treating PTSD and addiction, improving people’s mental health, and expanding college access. There was no shortage of interesting ways for virtual reality to do some good, and I wanted to get involved somehow.

• The power of VR goes beyond where it can take you. (1) It’s immersive; it can make you feel (emotionally) like you’re somewhere you’re not. (2) It’s interactive; it can allow you to feel (physically) a virtual environment. As these dimensions get better, virtual reality will allow anyone to experience anything. This is a powerful tool, but we should be thoughtful about when we prefer using it to reality.

• It just so happened that my boss gained his own interest in VR while I was in the thick of my exploration. Suddenly I had the opportunity to lead a project around VR. Our goal was to find ways to use VR for good, and we started our exploration in the area of education.

For those who haven’t used virtual reality, I highly recommend trying First Steps on an Oculus Quest 2 (or go to a Meta Store). Using a headset for the first time, you might feel disoriented or even nauseous; you’ll have to adjust the headset multiple times to make it fit on your head; and your hair will get messed up. But if you can get past all of that, you might just feel like you’re in the future – or at least the best video game ever.

This video shows you the First Steps experience in 2D, but it feels completely different in the headset. No matter where you turn your head, you’re in a virtual world. Your hands are visible, and you can use them; I’ve never been so entertained by throwing a paper airplane or pushing a button. As you gain more exposure, you start to wonder: what else can I do here?

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. Truthfully, we didn’t get very far; it turns out to be really expensive to build good content. But we did spend a lot of time thinking and learning about the technology, and I think that’s worth sharing. In this post, I’ll talk about the inspiration behind the project.

Virtual reality had been on my radar for a while

My first exposure to virtual reality doing some good in the world came from prisons. It turns out that some prisons are using virtual reality to help people with life skills training and with their mental health.

For people who have been in prison for a long time, it can be jarring to go back into the real world. Technology has advanced; you’ve adapted your behaviors to survive in an untrusting and highly regulated environment. In an ideal world, people in prison would be given extensive reentry programs to practice being in crowds, interviewing for jobs, managing conflict, or going to the DMV. But in our world, those real-world opportunities are rare, and that’s where virtual reality has some potential.

Mentioned in the article above, virtual reality programs are allowing people in prison to practice (in a virtual world) basic activities that they’ll do once they’re back in the real world. In these programs, you can use a self-scan checkout, withdraw money from an ATM, or practice a job interview in VR. Based on quotes from the people involved, it’s helpful to practice these activities. When I talked to a program manager for one of these initiatives, I was struck by the fact that it’s not just doing the activities that helps but managing the emotional response to the activities that makes a big difference. Even though these experiences were virtual (and sometimes not even that realistic), they elicited real emotions, like anxiety, stress, and anger. Social workers could then help the men process those emotions and manage their response to the situation.

While it’s early to know whether these VR prison programs had a measurable impact, my interest was piqued. As I continued researching, I found that VR had been having a measurable impact on treating people with PTSD and addiction, under much the same premise as helping the people in prison manage their emotional response. The researchers behind this work talk about VR as an alternative to role-playing with a therapist. With addiction, for example, therapists could elicit a more real craving by putting people in VR and exposing them to drugs than they could pretending to be at a party with the patient. They could then help the patient to manage their response to the craving using cognitive behavioral therapy or other techniques.

A bit more research uncovered promising applications of VR for improving mental health (e.g. enabling meditation or helping kids process anxiety about going to the hospital) and for college access (e.g. providing virtual college tours for everyone or helping students practice going to office hours).

There was just no shortage of interesting applications of virtual reality for good, and I wanted to get involved somehow. 

My exploration was pointing to some unique strengths of VR

I had initially thought of VR as a field trip machine. It can transport you anywhere, shrink you or stretch you to any size, put you under water or in outer space. But as I had conversations with people in the field, I realized its powers are beyond where it can take you.

1. VR can make you feel (emotionally) like you’re somewhere you’re not. In other words, it’s immersive. This is why VR has been successful with addiction and mental health; you can make people have an emotional response to a situation and then help manage that response with therapy. The craziest part about this dimension is that the animation doesn’t have to look that good in order to feel it. Your brain does the work for you!

2. VR can allow you to feel (physically) a virtual environment. In other words, it’s interactive. This dimension will continue to improve as hardware makers create haptic devices (like for smell and touch). And better interactivity begets better immersion; virtual reality will start to feel closer to reality. That’s a little bit scary, but it could also afford some pretty amazing opportunities for learning and doing.

As these dimensions get better, virtual reality will allow anyone to experience anything. You’ll be able to go places and do things in the virtual world and feel like you’re really there doing it.

Still, a question remains. Virtual reality can be a really good simulation of reality, but certainly reality is better than virtual reality in many instances. When does it make sense to use virtual reality instead of reality? It makes sense when there are no other alternatives: for example, when the desired activity is prohibitively costly, dangerous, or straight-up impossible. But we should be thoughtful about using it where it’s most beneficial or necessary.

Then my boss gained an interest in VR

While I had been exploring my interest in virtual reality, my boss Steve had gained his own interest through his friend Sendhil Mullainathan. You can hear some of their discussion on Steve’s podcast here, but basically Sendhil bought an Oculus headset and thought it was amazing.

During one of our team meetings, Steve asked if anyone was interested in exploring a project in virtual reality, and I very quickly raised my hand. There wasn’t a specific idea at the start; we just wanted to find ways to use virtual reality for good. Naturally, Steve bought an Oculus headset for our office so that we could do some field research. That’s where I got to try First Steps and a bunch of other cool games.

We decided that the first step in our exploration was narrowing our focus to one area of impact, and we chose education based on some of RISC’s other initiatives. I think we ended up picking the wrong area, but I’ll discuss that more next week.

Until then!

Noah

The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

Subscribe for free to stay up to date and support my work.

Subscribe now

In This Edition (5 minute read)

• Why we should care about burnout among 911 call takers and some ideas for supporting them

• The Idea List, which explores pep talks from kindergartners, drilling for energy, defibrillator drones, surgeries in virtual reality, and sponge-y cities

• The importance of rest

When we think of the people behind emergency response, we think of paramedics, EMTs, police officers, and firefighters. These heroes deserve all the support we can give. This post focuses on one group of first responders that, in my view, is too often overlooked and underappreciated. We never see this group, but their role is on the front lines. In fact, they’re typically the first person we talk to in an emergency. Maybe we forget about them because our interaction is over once we hang up the phone.

911 call takers deserve way more attention. Think about how taxing this job is. You field calls from people all day long, often on the worst day of their lives. Most can’t take breaks due to staffing shortages. To really sympathize with the role, you should listen to firsthand accounts on the Within the Trenches podcast. After one episode, you’ll understand why turnover is so high. We need solutions to support this essential group of workers.

Like other first responders, 911 call takers are at elevated risk of PTSD. But enhanced mental health benefits (along with higher pay and more advanced training) are hard to obtain because the Office of Management and Budget classifies 911 call takers as clerical workers, not first responders. States have been trying to change this, but most efforts get stuck (including a federal bill from 2019). Legislation will likely bring the most immediate impact for 911 call taker mental health.

But in the absence of quick government action, is there anything that could make a big difference?

I’ll share one idea with actual evidence first. In this study, behavioral scientists ran a six-week email series in which stories of 911 call takers were shared with their peers. Their peers were encouraged to share their own stories in response, and apparently it was a very engaging exercise. The study claims to have reduced resignations by more than half in the months after the series ended!

I have a couple thoughts of my own, too! They probably won’t work, but I would love to know what a 911 call taker thinks about them.

1. Listening to firsthand accounts, one thing that struck me is that 911 call takers often don’t know what happens after the caller hangs up the phone. They’re left wondering whether the situation is resolved, whether everyone is okay. Maybe simple closure could resolve some anxiety. What if 911 call takers got a paper report of their call outcomes at the end of a shift? Or what if we established a callback number where people could leave an update (and a positive message) for their 911 call taker?

2. 911 call takers field calls all day long, rarely getting a break to process a bad call. At the same time, there are a lot of 911 calls that should not be 911 calls. What if we could filter those calls somehow so that call takers could have the time back for themselves?

I’d love to hear your own ideas if you have them!

The Idea List

🗣️ Start a hotline that gives pep talks from kindergartners

This is a brilliant display of social good. Let this be a reminder that it doesn’t take much to put a smile on someone else’s face.

🔥 Drill 12 miles into the Earth to find a renewable energy source

Quaise Energy wants to tap into a new power source: geothermal energy in the Earth’s crust. It gets hot as you drill deeper into the Earth, and converting that heat into electricity could potentially power the world. Recent advances, like Quaise’s drilling method and better batteries, might just make this possible.

🚁 Deliver defibrillators by drone

I’m excited about the positive potential of drones. This article discusses a pilot study in Sweden using drones to deliver AEDs. When time is of the essence or travel is difficult, drones can literally save lives.

👩‍⚕ Practice surgeries in virtual reality

Next month, I’ll be writing about my work exploring virtual reality as a tool for social good. Surgical training is one example of a promising application. As I’ll discuss, virtual reality can democratize experience; but we also need to make sure that training in a virtual world translates to proficiency in the real world.

🧽 Help cities adapt to climate change by turning them into sponges

Water, when too abundant or scarce, can cause problems for cities. And paved surfaces trap water above ground, worsening floods and droughts. These cities are greening their industrialized areas to capture excess water and hold it for when it’s needed most.

One Last Thing: Rest

I love James Clear’s 3-2-1 Newsletter. Every Thursday, he shares 3 of his own ideas, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question for the reader. It’s a short read and has great little nuggets here and there. One week this month, he shared the following quote from the poet May Sarton on the importance of rest:

“I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.”

I’ve been reflecting on what activities make me feel rested. Reading, walking, and cooking come to mind, and I’m hoping to spend more time doing those things in April.

Until next time,

Noah

Previous Editions

You can also check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other big social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

Subscribe for free to stay up to date and support my work.

Subscribe now

In This Edition (5 minute read)

• How our ever-growing space junk problem could render space unusable

• The Idea List, which explores senior citizen loneliness, reducing gun deaths, roads as electric vehicle chargers, smart toilets, and prescription drug prices

• The concept of “Yes, and…”

Earlier this month, a geomagnetic storm knocked 40 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites out of commission. While SpaceX says that the satellites will burn up upon re-entering the atmosphere, this event sparked a lot of chatter about one of my favorite problems: space junk. I was going to write this whole section about it, but then Tristan Wagner (my friend, coworker, and bowling partner) sent me this amazing post from the Year 2049 newsletter that does a really good job of explaining the problem and pointing out some startups developing solutions! You should definitely read their post. But if you’re interested in how I think about space junk, here you go.

Over the years, humans have launched a bunch of stuff into space. This stuff (mostly satellites) serves important functions, like providing GPS and monitoring the climate, and ideally we want to be able to launch more stuff into space. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon are sending thousands of satellites into space over the next few years in hopes of providing internet for the entire world, which sounds awesome in theory!

The problem is that space is getting crowded. Most of the stuff we have launched into space is now defunct, and defunct satellites collide with each other, blow up, or break apart, multiplying the debris flying around Earth. The debris is dangerous, whipping around Earth at about 16,000 mph. In a 2021 report on orbital debris (also referenced by Year 2049), NASA reported over 26,000 pieces of junk that could destroy a satellite on impact, over 500,000 pieces of junk that could cause damage to spacecraft or satellites, and over 100 million pieces of junk that could puncture a spacesuit. And we can’t even track the pieces that closely! Emergency maneuvers are becoming more common for space stations and satellites, and more collisions mean more space junk. 

In economics, this is a classic tragedy of the commons problem, and space will become useless if we keep moving in the direction we’re going. If we want space to be usable (which I really think we do), we need solutions to track and remove existing junk from orbit and to regulate the future use of space. There are a lot of really smart people starting to work on the technical side of this problem (but sadly RISC can’t build a spaceship to collect space junk), and I’m interested in seeing what Privateer Space accomplishes in this regard. International agreements are pretty hard, so regulation might be out of the question. But without solutions or cooperation, we might be using paper maps in 2050!

If it were up to me, we would outfit the thousands of outgoing SpaceX and Amazon satellites with garbage collectors (nets, if you will). What’s your crazy idea to solve the space junk problem?

The Idea List

👵🏻 A national pilot on senior citizen loneliness

My amazing colleagues received press for our work with the Monroe County Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) to create a heat map of senior citizen loneliness. I’m really excited to see where this project goes.

🔫 Reduce gun violence with smart guns, liability insurance, and beautification

Working on social change in Chicago, reducing gun violence is often top of mind. Here are three very different approaches that caught my eye this month. 

🚽 Measure vitals signs using toilets

This idea captures one of my fundamental approaches for making a difference in the world: meet people where they’re at. Everyone has to use the toilet, so I like the idea of designing an intervention around toilets that make people’s lives better.

🛣️ Turn roads into electric vehicle chargers

I had to plug this innovation coming out of my home state. My question: if we can charge our cars by driving on the road, can we power our cities in the same way?

💊 Charge less for prescription drugs (because we can)

Mark Cuban’s CostPlus Drug Company helps visualize the high cost of prescription drugs in the United States. The site doesn’t take insurance, but it makes you wonder why the cost-plus-15% price of a drug like Albenzadole (for tapeworms) is over $6000 less than the retail price.

One Last Thing:

This month, I’m thinking a lot about the concept of “Yes, and…” from improv comedy. 

On an episode of the The Tim Ferriss Show, Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball and The Big Short) talks about how the rules of improv comedy help him generate better ideas. In improv, you’re supposed to accept what the person before you says and build on it. His best advisors do this with him during brainstorms, and he says it helps his ideas reach new heights.

He also recounts a wonderful quote from Danny Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow): “Don’t try to show me how smart you are by showing how stupid everybody else is. Show me how smart you are by showing me how smart everybody else is.”

Until next time,

Noah

P.S. I’m on vacation next week, so I’ll see you in two weeks!

Previous Editions

You can also check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other big social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.

• This is the last of three posts about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll share some reflections and tell you where the project is heading next.

• Reflecting on this journey so far, I wish I had done some things differently. If I ever lead another software development project, I plan to (1) put a working product into people’s hands as soon as possible, (2) keep the initial product simple and focused, and (3) create commitment devices.

• We are excited to continue building our tool, and the path ahead is full of opportunities. Our upcoming pilots span multiple universities and serve populations from economics students to Latino students. There are also new use cases for our tool, including mentorship that revolves around events rather than ongoing programs.

• To say our idea another way, we’re making it easy for communities to build directories that help people seek advice from people with more experience. If everything goes right, my dream would be that a directory exists for every community, and anyone going through a hard experience would be able to find a relevant directory and talk with someone. I want to help build a world where people everywhere are helping each other by sharing their lived experience.

• If you are interested in building this world with us, I would love to chat.

This is the last of three posts about RISC’s mentorship project. Here’s a recap of the story so far.

1. We came up with an idea: build a web tool that makes it easy to start mentorship programs that empower mentees to find mentors for themselves. The matching process in current mentorship programs creates a suboptimal experience for mentees for three main reasons: (1) matches sometimes don’t work out, (2) mentors have limited lived experience, and (3) it’s hard to switch mentors or find additional ones. By flipping the matching process on its head and letting mentees pick their own mentors, mentorship programs can alleviate some of these challenges. There aren’t great tools for building mentee-driven mentorship programs, so we thought we could build a tool ourselves. Read more about the idea here.

2. We built a working product in partnership with an amazing group of student developers and piloted our tool in multiple communities. Nova worked with us to talk with potential users, create mockups, respond to feedback, and deliver something that people could actually use. Three different programs serving three different populations saw value in what we were building and tried it out. While the pilot results varied, we showed that our tool can work, and we did social good! Read the full story of building and piloting the tool here.

In this final post, I’ll share some reflections on the journey so far and tell you where the project is heading next.

Learning things the hard way

Looking back, I made a lot of mistakes. If I ever lead another software development project, here’s what I will do differently.

I will put a working product into people’s hands as soon as possible. It took about 8 months from our first conversation with a potential user to the day we finished developing the tool. During that time, we were showing people what the tool could look like, and people were telling us how great it looked. When it came down to using the tool, just three of those programs acted on their words. If I could go back in time, I would have picked a handful of our earliest potential users and asked to build them a new website. Some would have probably said “no” right way, but that would have been great. That would have been a clear signal about who actually wants our tool. For those that agreed, we would have gotten them using something within weeks instead of months. Their feedback would have been based on real use, not perceived use; people aren’t good at imagining themselves in hypothetical situations. With feedback from building websites for a handful of programs, we could have done a bunch of learning now, rather than 8 months from now. And we could have finished our initial product with some confidence that people would use it and with a better sense of who our core users would be.

I will keep the initial product simple and focused. It’s super easy to get swept up in the excitement of developing new features, but you’ll build a product that strays from your initial vision. In our case, we talked to a lot of mentorship program leaders who were excited about how our tool could potentially alleviate the challenges of running a mentorship program. They suggested that our software could help with other program functions, like announcements, events, and matching surveys. We had a gigantic list of product features on our roadmap, and we ended up with features on our tool that nobody uses. We didn’t need features for applying to programs or making fancy home pages; people can do those things with other software tools easily. There weren’t tools for creating community-specific directories, and that’s where we should have focused our product. The extra features made it harder to start using our tool and scared away potential users.

I will create commitment devices. RISC doesn’t care about making a profit, but I fear that not charging people may have devalued our tool. At the very least, it’s easy to back out of using a free tool. I’m a trusting person, so I figured that people would act on their words when they said that they would test our tool. In a world where people have limited time and energy, it was easy to get pushed aside, and we ended up with a lot less pilot data than we’d hoped. Although we still don’t charge for our tool, we try to have people sign a non-binding “agreement” saying that they will test our tool and provide feedback. We hope this will help internalize the commitment and generate more follow-through. In the future, I would not be opposed to taking a “social good deposit” or doing other things to get people to stick to their word.

What’s next for the project

We are excited to continue building, and the path ahead is full of opportunities. Since our three initial pilots, we have partnered with many new communities. In the coming months, our tool will be used in:

• A nonprofit connecting Latino professionals with Latino college students

• An alumni mentorship program for veteran college students

• Two organizations connecting panelists with college students

• Two business fraternities facilitating coffee chats for new members

• A mentorship program for diversity in STEM

• And hopefully many more communities!

As we talk to more communities, I am surprised by the new ways that people imagine using our tool. Several of our upcoming pilots aren’t mentorship programs at all, at least not in the typical sense. One organization is holding a panel related to careers in financial technology. After the panel, panelists will create profiles on the tool and hold coffee chats with interested students. This is classic networking in a lot of ways, but hopefully our tool levels the playing field for students who wouldn’t typically feel comfortable networking. And the mentorship is happening around one event, rather than an ongoing mentorship program.

As more people use our tool, we’ll be able to make improvements and clearly identify our target use cases, whatever they may be. At the end of the day, we are trying to enable mentee-driven mentorship, and we may find some interesting ways to do that beyond where we started.

Help us build a more helpful world

To say our idea another way, we’re making it easy for communities to build directories that help people seek advice from people with more experience.

My dream would be that a directory exists for every community. Imagine walking into a college campus and finding easily accessible directories of people ready to help you with your questions about your major or your identity. And they wouldn’t just exist on college campuses, anyone going through a hard experience would be able to find a relevant directory and talk with someone. I want to help build a world where people everywhere are helping each other by sharing their lived experience.

If you are interested in building this world with us, I would love to chat.

Until next week,

Noah

• This is the second of three posts about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll talk about the work we’ve done so far to bring the idea to life.

• Our first challenge was finding volunteers to develop the tool. I knew that there were college clubs with talented developers interested in doing this kind of work for nonprofits, and we found one of these clubs in the amazing Nova, Tech for Good.

• Once we had our technical team, we spent a lot of time talking to people in mentorship programs. They largely validated our assumptions, complaining that their websites didn’t feel welcoming and didn’t do a good job facilitating mentoring relationships. Nova built a mockup of the tool based on their ideas for improving their websites, and we received such positive feedback that we developed the tool to match the mockups.

• We finished developing the first version of the tool in July 2021, and we had 10 pilot programs slated to start in August and September. But by the time August came around, that number had dropped to just three programs. The remaining programs were different sizes, served different populations, and had different outcomes from the pilot. One had highly engaged mentees, one had low mentee engagement but still liked the tool, and one had trouble convincing mentors to create profiles.

• The main goal of our pilot was to learn, and we sure did that. We learned that some existing mentorship programs may not need our tool, and we know that we need to make it easier to get started with our tool. We’ll also have to work hard to make mentees feel comfortable reaching out to mentors. But in all the craziness, our tool can work! And if nothing else happens from here, we helped some people find mentors.

Last week, I talked about the genesis of RISC’s mentorship project. Our idea is to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. More concretely, we’re building a software tool for creating websites that help mentees find their ideal mentors. If you want to read more about the idea and the inspiration behind it, check out last week’s post here.

In this post, I’ll talk about the work we’ve done so far to bring the idea to life.

Finding someone to develop the tool

The biggest challenge facing us in the early stages of the project was the fact that RISC doesn’t have software developers on staff nor the resources to spend on them. We were basically going to have to find someone to volunteer to build our mentorship tool. 

Again I was able to draw from my past experience running a mentorship program in college. Working with University IT on our program’s website had been such a hassle that we decided to talk with a club on campus about building us a better website for free. Students in the club were burgeoning software developers and designers, and they saw projects like these as a way to build cool stuff and add experience to their resumes. But before we could begin on the new website, COVID hit.

Now, instead of needing someone to build a better website for free, I needed someone to build a way for anyone to have a better website for free. Taking the same approach as in college, I thought RISC could partner with a college student group to develop our mentorship tool.

I scoured the internet for student groups, and I came across one at UCLA called Nova, Tech for Good. Their mission aligned well with RISC, and they had a track record of interesting technical projects built in partnership with nonprofits. My colleague April Feng and I met with them twice to talk about our project idea, and they asked us a ton of questions. We were asking a lot from them; they would basically be helping us build a nonprofit startup from the ground up.

After much discussion, they agreed to assemble a team of developers and designers around the project. As students, they have a million other commitments on top of this project, but their dedication to the problem, their boundless curiosity, and their willingness to ask hard questions have made them amazing partners. Without them, this project wouldn’t have happened, quite literally.

Developing the first version of our tool

Now that we had our technical team, we could start the development process.

Since we were building a tool for starting mentorship programs, we wanted to talk to as many people in mentorship programs as possible. Our goal was to create a council of potential users who could validate the problems we’d experienced and provide valuable feedback on our tool. Mentorship programs are basically everywhere, so my approach was to email people listed on mentorship program websites. I was surprised by how many people responded and continue to respond to my emails. By now, I’ve probably talked to over a hundred people about this project — from mentorship program leaders to cultural center administrators to community leaders in various student organizations.

Side note: Throughout this project, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to potential users. One thing that strikes me about people in this space is how incredibly kind and helpful they are. They serve such supportive roles in their communities, and that support comes through in their conversations with me, even if they aren’t interested in our product. With their busy schedules, I’ve been so grateful that they’ve given me the time to share our project and mission. And I sincerely hope that we’ll be able to build a product that empowers them to do this important work in a way that aligns with their goals, alleviates some administrative burden from their shoulders, and improves the experience for mentees in their communities.

Our initial conversations with mentorship programs largely validated our thoughts and provided some interesting ideas for building our tool. Overwhelmingly, program leaders complained that their websites didn’t feel welcoming and didn’t do a good job facilitating mentoring relationships. They wished their websites could enable scheduling coffee chats, filtering through mentors, and answering frequently asked questions. We took their suggestions with a lot of excitement, and Nova built a wireframe version of the tool. You couldn’t actually use it, but you could imagine how it would work.

As we showed the wireframe to our council of program leaders, we began to feel like we were doing something special. Program leaders showed great enthusiasm for what we’d built and made suggestions for additional features. They talked about how helpful it looked and how great it would be to finally use it for themselves. Feedback was so positive that Nova basically took the wireframe and developed the first version to match. It took about 8 months from our first conversation with a potential user to the day we finished developing the tool.

The first version of our tool (which is our current version) has three different views -- one for administrators, mentors, and mentees -- and it adjusts to each user’s unique role in the group. Administrators customize the content of their websites and manage mentor and mentee rosters. Mentors edit the information on their profiles and set availability for mentees. Mentees sort through the group’s mentors using tags and schedule chats with potential mentors to determine fit. If you want to see what it looks like, here is a quick demo I recorded.

The story so far had been pretty perfect, so we were surprised by what came next.

Piloting the tool

We finished the tool in July 2021. Most mentorship programs start at the beginning of the school year, so our pilots would begin in August and September. We had pilot programs lined up from academic departments, cultural centers, and student groups across multiple universities. Once August came around, people started to back out and delay their starts. We went from almost 10 pilot programs to 3 in the span of a month.

Of course, COVID restrictions were changing on campuses across the country. People had a lot to worry about besides piloting our mentorship tool, so we were getting pushed to the side. That made sense, but it made me uneasy. Was COVID just an excuse for programs to tell us nicely that our tool wasn’t good?

In any case, our tool was good enough to keep three groups interested through the craziness! Their feedback helped us learn a ton, and their experiences were pretty different.

The first program connected high school students with alumni from the high school to talk about careers, college, and life. They had an existing summer program and thought our tool might help extend their engagement with students to the school year as well. Their program was fairly small (about a dozen mentors and a dozen mentees), and we were excited to see our tool work really well for them. The majority of their mentees sparked connections with mentors, with some mentees even reaching out to multiple mentors. Their program leaders liked our tool so much that they’re planning on using it during their main summer programming!

The second program connected LGBTQ college students with LGBTQ faculty and staff at the college to talk about identity and interests. They were excited about the idea of empowering mentees to find mentors for themselves, and their program was fairly large (about 30 mentors and 30 mentees). COVID has put a strain on their community events, but some mentees used our tool to have conversations with mentors. It hasn’t been the success we’ve seen in the high school program, but it certainly hasn’t been a failure. Their program leaders have enjoyed using our tool, and they’re even creating a new program for BIPOC students in the coming months.

The last program connected first-generation college students with upperclassmen to talk about identity, college, and campus resources. This is a program I needed in college, so I was excited to work with them. Sadly, they couldn’t get their mentors or mentees interested in our tool. Their program leader was excited about the idea of mentee-driven mentorship, but her mentors saw our tool as another communication platform that they’d have to deal with. They were so against it that hardly any of them created profiles, even with gift card incentives!

We definitely learned some things

Our pilot results were mixed, but we were glad to get any results at all after such a rough start! The main goal at this stage was learning, and we definitely learned some things. Here are some of my biggest takeaways:

• Some existing mentorship programs may not need or want our tool. Based on the third group’s experience and the drop-off in pilot programs, it could be that our tool adds a level of inconvenience for programs that are already working well. This particular group was very tight knit; they didn’t need mentor profiles to seek out new mentors!

• We need to make it easier to get started using our tool. The drop-off in pilot programs tells me that there is something difficult about creating a program with our tool. Maybe program leaders couldn’t figure out how to make it work or couldn’t think of good questions for mentor profiles. In either case, we will need to think about simplifying our tool and providing extra resources and support for new users.

• Mentee-driven mentorship takes courage. Despite our best efforts to make it easy for mentees to reach out to mentors, we saw many mentees struggle to book chats. Testing with more groups and hearing from more mentees will help us understand this better, but we need to make sure that mentees receive mentorship. We might have to make it even easier to reach out to mentors, or we might have to have mentors do the initial outreach somehow.

• Our tool can work! Mentees found mentors and booked chats with them using our tool. In the first group, this happened for the majority of mentees! It will be important for us to understand what went right for the first group. And if nothing else happens from here, we helped some people find mentors.

We could have learned some of these things much earlier by taking a smarter approach, and we probably wouldn’t have seen so many programs back out in August. Next week, I’ll talk about what we would have done differently and where we hope to take the project next.

See you then :)

Noah

• Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll talk about the idea and the inspiration behind it.

• RISC had been interested in mentorship for a long time before I joined, but our ideas hadn’t gained traction. I thought we might find new opportunities in the problems faced by mentorship programs.

• Mentorship programs are mentor-mentee matching machines, but the typical matching process creates a suboptimal experience for mentees for three main reasons: (1) matches sometimes don’t work out, (2) mentors have limited lived experience, and (3) it’s hard to switch mentors or find additional ones.

• By flipping the matching process on its head and letting mentees pick their own mentors, mentorship programs can alleviate some of these challenges, but there aren’t great tools for building mentee-driven mentorship programs.

• Our idea is to build a web tool that makes it easy to start mentorship programs that empower mentees to find mentors for themselves. With such a tool, existing programs could improve the experience for their mentees and scale their programs, and groups without mentorship programs could start good ones easily.

When I hear the word mentor used, the connotations are often professional. I hear about experienced individuals recounting a career’s wisdom to aspiring youngsters. To me, mentoring is this and much more. I think of organizations like Project LETS, which specializes in peer support for people with mental illness, and GoodKids MadCity, which brings together youth in communities affected by gun violence. In organizations like these, mentees see themselves in someone else who shares their lived experience (often someone who isn’t much older than them), and mentoring is a back-and-forth conversation about life.

Professional or otherwise, mentoring does a bunch of good for everyone involved, and it’s especially important for people at the margins of society. 

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be talking about RISC’s mentorship project, where we want to make it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs. In this post, I’ll talk about the idea and the inspiration behind it.

RISC has been interested in mentorship for a while

When I started at RISC in August 2020, there was already interest in a mentorship project. Along with our own anecdotes on the positive effects of mentoring, there is pretty clear evidence to support the positive psychosocial benefits of mentoring for mentees and mentors. We imagined a world where anyone struggling with something could talk with someone who’s been through a similar experience, and we had been searching for ways to make that a reality. Our team’s ideas seemed to be fizzling out by the time I got to RISC, but I was personally interested in mentorship and ready to inject some new energy into the cause.

Having just graduated college, I knew that a lot of mentoring was happening through mentorship programs, and I had experience as a mentee, mentor, and program leader. Existing programs supported many people, but those programs were also struggling to provide a good experience for their mentees. It felt like there was an opportunity to tackle the challenges of mentorship programs while making mentoring accessible to anyone.

Mentor matching limits the mentee experience

Mentorship programs are mentor-mentee matching machines with some additional structure. Mentees enter a program by filling out a matching survey. A few days later, they receive an email with their mentor match (or mentor family). The matching process is typically manual, with program leaders looking through matching surveys and selecting mentor(s) they think will be best. Some programs have curriculum, events, and expectations around mentor-mentee conversations, while others leave it up to mentors and mentees to explore their relationship.

If you want concrete examples of mentorship programs, check out the University of Chicago’s Maroon Mentors, Stanford’s Economics Peer Advisors, and the University of Michigan’s SIBS Program. 

The system works well for getting a mentor to every mentee, and many relationships are successful. But as a former mentee in this system and from talking to mentees in other programs, there are some shortcomings with mentor-mentee matching:

• You sometimes don't vibe with your match. It’s something you’ll know within a few minutes of chatting, and it’s unfortunate when it happens (and it has happened to many of us). It can be even worse if you’re matched with a mentor who is largely absent or never even returns your emails.

• Advice is limited by the lived experience of your match. My mentors were helpful for questions about classes in my major or general college stuff (like where I could find the best chicken fingers on campus), but none shared my identity as a first-generation college student nor my interest in nonprofit work. This lack of shared perspective made it hard to bring up certain challenges and questions related to those parts of me.

• There is no built-in way to switch mentors or find additional ones. Of course, you can ask the program administrator for a new match (but risk hurting your mentor’s feelings), or you can go to the program’s website and find another mentor (but that assumes (1) there is a website, (2) the website has the relevant information, and (3) you feel comfortable writing an email asking someone to be your mentor).

During my junior year of college, I started a mentorship program with a friend to try to solve some of these problems, and it was harder than expected.

There’s a lack of tools to build mentee-driven programs

My mentorship program in college tried to put radical empowerment into the hands of mentees, letting them choose their own mentors by reading mentor bios on our website and reaching out to whoever they wanted. Mentees were encouraged to find mentors that spanned their whole identity. The thought was that a first-generation college student studying economics and interested in a career in academic research could use our website to find one mentor studying economics, one mentor with experience in academic research, and one first-generation mentor (if they couldn’t find one person who matched all three criteria). We also gave mentees the option to get matched, but we matched them with multiple mentors in order to make sure all aspects of their identity were covered.

We had over 50 students come through our program, and I would guess that 50% of them asked to get matched and 50% reached out to mentors directly on our website. Despite our decent engagement, we still felt like our program needed improvements.

University IT helped us make our website, and we designed it so that you could filter mentors based on tags related to their experience. But it would take months to get a hold of IT whenever we wanted to make basic changes, and mentees still needed to email mentors in order to start conversations, which takes a confidence that I didn’t have as an underclassman. And because Christina was the only one with site access, she had to manually copy and paste updates to 20 mentor bios every semester.

Basically, it was possible to start a mentorship program that put mentees in the driver’s seat, but it took a lot of work. And it still wasn’t everything we wanted!

Enter RISC

As my team at RISC was talking about helping people find mentors, I thought back to what I knew.

• Mentorship programs existed locally everywhere, and they served a lot of people

• Most mentorship programs provided a limited experience for their mentees

• Starting a mentee-driven mentorship program was difficult with existing tools

What if we just made it easier to start mentee-driven mentorship programs? If going through University IT was such a hassle and resulted in suboptimal websites anyway, we could make a software tool for creating websites designed specifically for helping mentees find their ideal mentors.

Some existing mentorship programs might not be interested in switching their model, but that would be okay. Other existing programs might adopt a mentee-driven model in order to improve the experience for their mentees. And if we could help manage the demands of their programs, they could even scale to reach more mentees. For groups without mentorship programs, we would be making it easier for mentorship to exist. 

If enough people started mentorship programs, we would be providing the tools for communities to build our imagined world where anyone struggling with something could talk with someone who’s been through a similar experience. Sure, it was a long shot, but we would have done some good if only five new mentoring relationships were sparked by our work.

So that became the idea! We would build a free software tool that would allow people to start mentee-driven mentorship programs.

Jeff and Steve liked it enough to let us try it, but we would have to find someone to develop the software. We ended up finding someone, but that’s a story for next week.

Until then!

Noah

• This post is an introduction to my job and this newsletter.

• I work at an innovation lab for social good founded by the economist behind Freakonomics, and my job is to find creative ways to make the world a better place. Some of my work includes building a free web tool for peer mentoring, using data to inform foster parent recruitment, and exploring how churches could utilize their extra space for social good.

• Each month, I’ll pick one of my projects and break it down on Fridays. I’ll talk about the idea, the inspiration and research behind it, the progress we’ve made so far, and the path ahead.

• I’m writing this newsletter for myself, but I’m also hoping that someone might (1) find it helpful for their own work or (2) want to collaborate on a project.

I always stumble over my words when people ask what I do for a living. It’s probably because the name of my organization is such a mouthful. I’m an analyst at the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago. Shortening to “Center for RISC” isn’t much help because then people think I work in insurance.

No, I don’t work in insurance

RISC is an innovation lab for social good, which means we generate creative ideas to make the world a better place and then we bring those ideas to life in the real world. We’re quite young (2ish years old) and quite small (15ish people), and our work spans education, foster care, criminal justice, mental health, and much more. If you read our website, you’ll see that our lab is the “brainchild” of Steve Levitt, but Jeff Severts leads our team alongside him.

You may know Steve as a co-author of Freakonomics or from his new podcast “People I (Mostly) Admire.” Steve is one of the most unconventional thinkers I’ve ever met, and he’s a whiz with data. He asks really good questions, ones that poke huge gaping holes in your ideas before you even get to the punchline.

You may not know Jeff, but he’s a big deal too. He grew Best Buy’s Geek Squad into a household name before doing the same with ULTA Beauty as chief marketer. Jeff is one of the most effective communicators I’ve ever met. His ability to concisely convey complicated concepts is embodied in Deadly Memos, his series of business pamphlets.

My day-to-day work varies A LOT

Work at RISC happens in “projects” – or social good initiatives. Projects typically involve the exploration or implementation of a specific idea to address a big social problem, but RISC’s role can vary in the implementation. Sometimes, RISC consults or lends capacity at no cost to big corporations, nonprofits, governments, or other organizations doing social good. Other times, analysts start projects from the ground up and find themselves running mini-organizations within RISC. The flexibility of RISC’s role means that analysts end up wearing many different hats: data scientist, product manager, consultant, entrepreneur, and whatever else a project calls for.

Here are some concrete examples of what I do:

• I’m leading the development of a free web tool that makes it easier to set up peer mentorship in existing communities. My day-to-day work consists of sourcing and onboarding community partners, managing a remote team of designers and developers, and listening to user feedback to prioritize product improvements and feature ideas.

• I’m analyzing data to inform foster parent recruitment strategies in multiple U.S. states. My day-to-day work consists of coding in R, translating analysis into slide decks, and leading meetings with stakeholders.

• I’m exploring a project to help churches unlock their underutilized space for social good. My day-to-day work consists of finding church leaders to talk to, listening to their challenges, and reading the articles and books they send me.

If you can’t tell already, this newsletter is about my work

Every month, I’ll take a project and break it down on Fridays.

On the first Friday of the month, I’ll tell you the idea and the inspiration behind it. You’ll get anecdotes, research, and articles; and I encourage you to respond with your own anecdotes, research, and articles (even if you completely disagree with the idea!).

On the second Friday, I’ll outline the progress we’ve made to date. You’ll hear about concrete actions I’ve taken, learnings, and challenges. I’m young and inexperienced, so I’ll take any advice I can get. You should respond if you have suggestions to make progress faster and better.

On the third Friday, I’ll tell you where the project is going next. Sometimes a project gets killed internally, but that doesn’t mean I won’t revisit it. I would love for someone to revitalize an old idea by partnering up with us or by suggesting a new path ahead.

In the extra week each month, I’ll share interesting articles and new ideas I’ve been thinking about but haven't pursued yet.

Why do I want to talk about my work?

There are a lot of reasons, really. By writing publicly:

• I’m forcing myself to think deeply about my work. Each post helps me collect and organize my own thoughts!

• I’m putting my work out there for anyone to read. In doing research for my own projects, I’ve learned the value of reading about what other people have already done. If my work and ideas can help anyone else working in similar areas, then I think that’s social good. And that’s my job!

• I’m opening the door for collaboration. RISC is a small team with very limited resources, which means we often have to find partners to have any chance of making an impact at scale. I’m hoping that people respond with ways to work together on shared interests!

It’s possible (even probable) that nobody will read this newsletter. But hey, by the end of the year I’ll have a public collection of my work at RISC, and that’ll be pretty cool :)

See you next week!

Noah

• Improve my work with feedback and suggestions

• Find my work helpful in their own work

• Reach out with potential collaborations

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