About Us
We're a team of young professionals: socially conscious, highly motivated, with expertise across sectors from business school to backpacking. We are activists trying to leverage the power of the creative sector and pop culture to make civic engagement cool. We are Creative Entrepreneurial Idealists.
We're a non-profit, limited liability corporation offering tools to connect the Creative, Service, and Donor sectors. We'll connect CEIs with resources and support for their Creative Community Building program ideas. We'll give community builders tools to improve their programs. We'll help funders find programs matching their desired themes. We'll help creatives find ways to give back to the community while invoking their passions. And many other interactions in between.
We want to be the center for Creative Community Building in America, the first place that students--from high school to grad school--come to figure out how to do good and have fun in line with their own interests.
In so doing, we want to occupy a valuable niche in the emerging "service movement" to rejuvenate America and improve its social infrastructure.
We operate within an emerging and unnamed movement that sits at the intersection of various sectors--Social Entrepreneurship, Philanthropy, and Creatives. Our approach and operations also overlap into activism, academia (particularly cultural history and conscious capitalism), business and marketing, and government. The emerging movement in which we are participating espouses a “do good, have fun” (or, “doing good and doing well”) attitude and is composed of disparate actors rallying around the common goal of making the US a better, more just place.
This loose, decentralized movement is most prominently characterized by three elements: the underlying philosophy of Social Entrepreneurship; an implicit recognition of the need for American rejuvenation—or, as others have put it, “nation building at home”; and by the optimistic hope that, taking advantage of emerging communications infrastructures, a new generation of leaders can meet our many challenges.
TIB is partly a direct donation website. Visitors can browse vetted programs and program ideas and decide where to donate, and how much. Prominent examples of this business model include Kiva, DonorsChoose.org, 40billion.com, JustGive.
TIB distinguishes itself from other Social Entrepreneurship and direct donation hubs in two ways:
First, TIB is more than just a direct donation site. It's a database and resource-sharing network built around our 3 sectors: Creative, Donor, and Service. The goal is to facilitate all kinds of productive interactions by members of these three sectors. Funding is a key component, but so is knowledge sharing, publicity, talent searching, project scaling, and other types of collaboration. While our goal is to put actors in touch, our project-based approach ensures there's always an action behind the discussion.
Second, its concentration on the Creative Sector, and the unique concept of and branding strategy behind Creative Entrepreneurial Idealism (CEI). TIB combines the functionality of other “industry competitors” with a strong brand and explicit goal of leveraging the power of creativity and the Creative Sector (arts & entertainment) to help grow the audience for civic engagement.
That’s why we consider other direct donation sites as teammates rather than competitors: we’re working in different ways toward similar goals. With its unique project and attitude, TIB hopes to carve out its own niche in this emerging eco-system.
Ivan Z Cestero, TIB founder, was educated in American literature and theory (Dartmouth 2001) and, more recently, European Studies (MA, NYU 2009). His professional background is in education, having taught across Europe and in New York. Co-Founder of both YEAOW and the Currier Island National Ultimate Frisbee Team, as well as various project ideas on TIB, Ivan is a Creative Entrepreneurial Idealist who wants to create a permanent cultural space for the growth of that industry, so that young creatives with great ideas for civic engagement will be encouraged to follow their dreams, and given impetus and support to do so. He lives in Brooklyn.
Sabrina Huff, TIB co-founder, (BA, Yale University '97 and MBA, Columbia Business School '06) is TIB's chief strategist. She is a founding team member for Verge Records – winner of 2006 NYU Stern Business Plan Competition – Social Entrepreneurship category. Sabrina performed investment research at Morgan Stanley and valuations for media companies at Chicago Partners. She is focusing on perfecting our business plan and mapping our development.
Jocelyn Leavitt (BA, Dartmouth '01 and MBA, Columbia Business School '07) is a strategic consultant for TIB. With a professional background in real estate, she is also researching the TIB TIMES project.
Georg Pedersen (MA, NYU Gallatin '07) is TIB's web developer. He's overseeing the construction of our CCB database.
Advisors
Trenton DuVal (BA, UC Berkeley '01) is TIB's communications manager, takes his experience at Results USA and Freedom From Hunger to lead our outreach and research operations.
Chris Tyler (Harvard Business School '09) is a strategic consultant for TIB. He's using his experience as a consultant at Monitor Group, to help us develop and execute our two year plan.
Jon Potter (MIT Sloan School of Management '09) is a strategic consultant for TIB. Co-founder of the DREAM Program, he is focusing on development of creative urban mentoring programs.
TIB is looking for other talented people who identify with our mission and vision. If you are interested in CEI and want to work with The Ideabox, please email us at info@ideabox.us !
