Continuing our interview series, Ashoka Peace interviews Daniel Lubetzky, serial peace entrepreneur who is creating new models for bridging the for-profit and non-profit worlds, and showing our peacebuilding can be financially sustainable.

1. What is the innovation you are pioneering? What are you doing that nobody else is doing and why?

What we like to do is to build models where business and social interests are totally aligned and reinforce one another. It is not easy to do.  A lot of the area of “corporate social responsibility” is structured around perceived sacrifices to the bottom line in order to address other important societal objectives.  The fun stuff comes when you are able to innovate through ventures whose financial and social objectives reinforce one another. 

I received an email recently telling me about a non-traditional walking tour that allows citizens in Telaviv to ‘meta-tour’ Palestinian Gaza, and New Yorkers to explore Baghdad in their own city.   The concept confused me a bit so I decided to check it out. 

Youarenothere.org (YANH) calls itself a ‘dislocative tourism agency’.  A Jewish and Palestinian-founded group, Palestinian Laila El-Haddad and Israeli New York-based Mushon Zer-Aviv have created a city tour to explore conflict zones from a distance.

How does the tour work?

A few interesting developments have taken place in Iraq in the last week:  First, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, visited Iraq to launch a massive digitalization project of the Iraq National Museum.  Then, within a day, the Iraqi government announced its first Youtube channel.  While these two events were likely coordinated, it’s noteworthy that Iraq is at a stage where it’s now able to start thinking about things like social media.

What is the Google project?
The Google project is a joint project with the State-Department to digitalize the Iraq National Museum.  Since the beginning of the war, 15,000 items dating back to the Mesopotamian era have been stolen from the museum.  While 6,000 have been retrieved, the museum has had major security problems over the last decade.  Google employees are charged with taking photographs of the museum to create a digitalized museum for the world.  They have already taken more than 14,000 photographs and are hoping to launch the digital museum by early 2010. 

You've probably heard of sports being used as a tool of social change, to bring people together and to build the skills in youth that they will need later in their lives. Sport - most notably football/soccer, and cricket in South Asia - has also often been employed to bring communities in tension together. But I've never before heard of basketball being used to build peace, especially in countries not known for a basketball culture.

J.D. Walsh, a former basketball player and resident of New York, is travelling the world to encourage children in difficult circumstanbces to play basketball, including in places balanced on the knife-edge such as Kashmir, and Israel and Palestine. Read about his work in Kashmir here, where basketball has made a difference to many children's lives. Similarly, in Israel and Palestine, he has played with Arab and Jewish children, witnessing firsthand the power of basketball as mediation.