2 simple ways you can make a difference in the world

The Small Things Challenge

Here’s an easy way to contribute.

At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, while 75 million children worldwide are not in school. By pooling surprisingly small investments, we can help to significantly improve educational access and economic development. It’s called The Small Things Challenge, and it’s a campaign based on the premise that every small action can make a big difference to ensure quality education and economic opportunity for all. We challenge you to join us in becoming a part of the solution. Your help will make a difference. Click here and they’ll donate 25¢ to the cause. Intel wants to rally millions of people. That 25¢ can become $300,000.

Just one click on your mouse and you can donate 25 cents. How easy is that? Dead set easy – so do it NOW! Yep – right now.

Thanks.

Kiva

We Let You Loan to the Working Poor

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Matt and Jessica Flanery knew that many people don’t give money to charity in part because they don’t really know where their money goes. So, Matt and Jessica decided to fix it. Their amazing organization, Kiva.org, has essentially democratized accountability for charities by linking up donors in rich countries with individual borrowers in poor countries.  

You can create your own personal profile and loan directly or join one of the open groups and contribute as one of their members. Some groups are by location (country, city), some are by affiliation (cat lovers – no not really – but there are 470 pages of groups so it is possible).

Here’s how Kiva describes their process and intentions:

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals in need of funding – not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.

I’d love to hear from you if you have other ideas and recommendations that are simple, doable ways we can bring about the change we want to see in the world.