Mobile Phones Ring With Calls to Action

In the United States, cellphones are catching on as a way to create social change, reports The Boston Globe. Mobile phones provide discreet access for people to receive information and a platform for broadcasting a message to like-minded activists. They also allow people the convenience of receiving information they can act on immediately, without first requiring them to return to their computers.

Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations that use cellphones for activism, says that people who “have a relationship with an organization or really care about an issue” are willing to get information on their headsets.

“It’s about people, community-based groups basically, better leveraging their social capital to do good,” says Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, in Boston, which has created a service called Speakeasy that enables people with knowledge of a foreign language and a cellphone to become part of a network of volunteer translators. “People talk too much about social capital these days, and it’s all in the abstract,” he says. “This makes it very concrete.”

For more on cellphones and social activism, read The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s recent coverage.

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