Help Alleviate Chronic Poverty: Opportunity International

A philanthropic-minded family, the Ebingers, has issued a challenge to Opportunity International, a microfinance institution that helps aspiring small entrepreneurs all over the world, to spread the word about the organization's work. For every person that completes a small (we're talking less than one minute) survey, the family will donate $10, up to a total of $50,000 in all. This is a no-brainer! Find out more about Opportunity International and check out the challenge here.

Trash to Treasure

I love the idea of taking someone's garbage and making it into something useful. The Breast Cancer site has a take on this idea by featuring bags made in the Phillipines that are crafted by a womens' cooperative from juicebox packages that would normally take forever (or maybe longer) to decompose. While you save the environment and further a small business venture/social enterprise, you simultaneously help women obtain mammograms who would not normally be able to afford them.

The bags seem durable, bright, and fun. Plus, having one means not needing to take additional plastic bags from the grocery store. Some stores, like Whole Foods, will even reward you for bringing your own bags by passing along a cash discount to you. (I've heard that anywhere up to 20% of grocery store mark-ups go to providing packaging. There's no reason they shouldn't pass that savings along to you, even if it is only a nickel!)

I think this may be a win-win-win-win situation. What's not to like about that?

Want to Fight AIDS? Buy a Cell Phone.

A provocative social enterprise article from the NYTIMES:

A new line of products from companies like Gap, Armani Exchange and Motorola aims to raise money to help fight AIDS in Africa.

Those companies, along with Converse and American Express, created the new products, which bear the brand name Red and are to begin appearing in stores this month. The companies are committed to selling the products for at least five years, and plan to donate part of their profits to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

If the Red products sell the way the companies’ other products do, the fund stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars annually — enough to provide AIDS medications to hundreds of thousands of Africans each year.

The campaign was created by the musician Bono and Bobby Shriver, a California politician and member of the Kennedy family. Both are leading advocates for the Global Fund. The fund, which will collect and distribute money from Red in Africa, says the hundreds of millions of dollars each year given by world governments is not enough to provide medications to all of the people who need them.

You can log-in to read the rest of the article here.

Kiva

I love the idea of helping people help themselves. Kiva is a website that does just that through small person to person loans. Kiva allows people from all over the globe to provide funds to fledgling entrepreneurs in the developing world so that they can begin to lift themselves out of poverty by engaging in the local economy.

The basics seem pretty simple. A loan request is posted, along with details describing what the loan will be used for, and the timeframe in which the loan will be paid back to the lender. Loans are broken up in order to both lessen the risk for lenders and make lending a more real possibility for folks of modest means.

Saving money on the small stuff allows you to make it go father than on things like toothpaste. What I like about Kiva is that is streches the dollar in a way that makes me proud. Plus, since the money gets repaid, the entire process has a sense of accountability built in, and I believe the effects will be even more transformative than just giving someone money outright.

I have yet to donate, but will update my results when I do.