Fenton’s Monthly Reads: November 2019

Curated by our experts, Fenton’s Monthly Reads is your guide to the biggest ideas in social change. Spanning our five core issue areas – Environment + Sustainability, Foundations, Global Health, Advocacy, Corporate Social Action – the following articles are your bite-sized introduction to social impact this November.

    1. See Big Tech’s terrible diversity record, visualized using its logos. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook remain overwhelmingly white and male. Here’s a look at their diversity numbers, visualized through their logos.By Matt Stempeck, Fast Company
      [5-minute read]
    2. How much is a whale worth? The benefits provided by great whales, including capturing carbon, make a powerful case for protecting them, according to economists.
      By Madeleine Stone, National Geographic
      [5-minute read]
    3. The Toll of Me Too: Assessing the costs for those who came forward. Was it worth it? Is it still? Will it ever be?
      By Rebecca Traister, The Cut
      [11-minute read]
    4. Refugee stories could do more harm than good. The pressure of storytelling can leave refugees feeling tokenised and disempowered.
      By Rifaie Tammas, Open Democracy
      [4-minute read]
    5. We Teach A.I. Systems Everything, Including Our Biases. Researchers say computer systems are learning from lots and lots of digitized books and news articles that could bake old attitudes into new technology.
      By Cade Metz, New York Times
      [6-minute read]
    6. The American anti-abortion movement is reverberating abroad. Trump’s isn’t the first administration to stop giving money to the UN Population Fund, or take issue with global reproductive health gatherings. All Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have taken the same stance. Why? They all claimed the UN agency promotes abortion.
      By Annalisa Merelli, Quartz
      [5-minute read]
    7. 101 Ways to Live Sustainably. The least you can do to makea big difference where you live.
      By Kayleen Schaefer and Leon Edler, Curbed
      [15-minute read]
    8. How Climate Change Is Clobbering Kids’ Health. Let’s pretend the 195 nations that signed the 2016 Paris Climate Accord really do take all of the steps necessary to reach the agreement’s key goal: limiting the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
      By Jeffrey Kluger, Time
      [4-minute read]
    9. Billionaire Philanthropists Shift from Grant Making to Strategic Collaboration. Billionaires are increasingly applying their entrepreneurial spirit and business skills to their philanthropic pursuits, according to a UBS report.
      By Fang Block, Penta
      [2-minute read]
    10. Psychologists from 40 countries pledged to use their jobs to address climate change. The leaders of psychological associations from more than 40 countries signed a proclamation this week at a conference on psychology and global health in Lisbon, pledging to use their expertise as psychologists to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.”
      By Zoë Schlanger, Quartz
      [5-minute read]