The Ideabox

TIB’s mission is to list, support and enable creative, artistic, and fun community building projects across the USA. Serving as a serving as a hub of all such projects and project proposals will allow creatives, community builders, and donors to interact easily and productively toward common goals of improving individual communities. Our long-term mission in exuding the ethos of CEI is to legitimize civic engagement in the mainstream.

TIB’s vision is Creative Entrepreneurial Idealism, or CEI. By focusing on creative, “cool” projects and engaging them with elements of our pop culture, we will frame service and civic engagement as cool, and help grow the audience for it. By engaging actors across sectors in the CEI brand, we envision a cultural shift that falls in line with a larger historical moment that we are entering: a post 9/11 period of social infrastructural renewal. (For more, see these blog entries.)   

TIB’s goal is to improve both the quality of local communities and the visibility of the programs that improve them in a fun, attractive way. We believe the dedication of some part of our lives to ideals such as “giving back to those around us” and “engaging in civic life” is both a wise personal investment and something that, if done on a mass scale, will bring lasting returns for all. 

Why TIB?

Because social entrepreneurship and community service are great notions in need of a wider audience, better publicity, and more visible ways to engage. 

Social entrepreneurship draws certain types of people, namely incredibly dedicated and often well-educated "do-gooders" who endeavor to save the world, feed the starving, educate the illiterate, bring water to deserts, etc. These people are heroes. But the fact is that our entertainment-obsessed, individualist, consumer-driven culture doesn’t prioritize the hagiography of social entrepreneurs. At least not yet.

TIB believes that the creation of a CEI community will harness the already powerful driving forces in the social entrepreneurship and community service fields by creating a space where good works can converge with the emotional power of art, the media power (and cool factor) of celebrity, as well as the universal appeal of being part of a cutting edge, socially conscious movement--that also happens to be really fun. 

As Good Magazine has come to realize, it is possible to do good and have fun. In fact, it’s cool to feel connected to something larger than yourself (beyond your intramural softball team). Civic and community service need not be a chore; community activists need not forfeit their social lives or cool quotients (President Obama was a community organizer!). Through the combination of countless individual projects and the values of the CEI movement, TIB will help take the "do good, have fun" mentality to the next level.

What does TIB do within this "do good, have fun" industry?

Generally, TIB explores, develops, and enables the myriad possibilities of using art, creativity, and fun for the greater good.

Specifically, TIB is wearing a few hats: aggregator/incubator, fundraiser/grantgiver, publicist/communicational node, do-good industry player/personality, and blog. We are:

• recruiting project partners for our Big List.
• trying to generate publicity and funding for those projects.
• spreading word about the merits of the CEI lifestyle.
• working with MBA programs to match business school students with young CEIs to execute particular projects.
• assembling a team of creative professionals to consult with companies who want to inject creativity and social awareness into their business models.
• waxing theoretical about the evolution of the "do-gooder" industry (and the need eliminate the pejorative context, along with those quotations) , conscious capitalism, civic awareness, entertainment, and American rejuvenation.

Ideally, all of this will eventually reveal that TIB is also: starting a movement. And it is having a good time at it.

Won’t you join us?