It’s not easy to make social change with technology. There’s excitement around bringing “innovation” to social problems, which usually means bringing in ideas from the technology industry. But societies are more than software, and social enterprise doesn’t have the same economics as startups.
I knew all this going into my summer fellowship at Blue Ridge Labs, but my experience has given me a clearer idea of why. These are the themes that kept coming up for me after two months working with 16 other fellows on the problem of access to justice (A2J) for low-income New Yorkers.