Part 1:

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Part 2:

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Tomorrow marks “black friday”, the busiest shopping day of the year. I can tell you for certain I will be no where near a mall or store tomorrow. I’ve come to realize there are things a hell of a lot more important than “stuff”. In lieu of blowing a bunch of your money, here are three charities I encourage you to support instead:

Kiva – those that know me, know I’ve been a fan of Kiva for a long time (2007 to be precise).

Lumana — Here are details for their Holiday campaign

Charity: Water

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Happy holidays!

Let us take you back for a moment with us to Mazabuka, Zambia…to the orphanage and home of Joseph and Chipego.

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I donated. Did you?

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Donate NOW

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From David Bowden via Blake Mycoskie

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I’ve been on a net drop while I was in Ghana with Sloane and Taylor — and its truly an amazing experience that you need to experience for yourself to understand the full weight of its power.

And I have to give a hat tip to Jaclyn Schiff (who I just found today via a blog comment she left somewhere) for tipping me off to End Malaria Day.

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Tom covered a few fascinating components that make games successful that could easily be applied to other verticals/industries. I’d encourage you to spend the 16 minutes right now and watch it.

Sorry, this is just my random Sunday evening thought, but the video got me thinking — why has a charity not taken advantage of the gaming concept to raise funds to fight poverty? I’m thinking something along the lines of Civilization or Risk — essentially, a game on a world wide scale that exposes participants to a variety of cultures, hardships, economic factors, professions, and individuals all across the world. Maybe a “Fight Poverty Now” game of sorts that progresses in various ways toward making the world a better place.

An organization like Kiva, Wokai, or Vittana would be a perfect fit or a game like this, since they already have profiles and photos for the vast majority of their clients that could be exposed directly inside the game experience to drive engagement with potential donors. A game setting could increase the engagement potential borrowers have with organizations exponentially. We all know that the more engaged someone is, the more likely they are to donate to a cause or organization — with in person visits being the best indicator of receiving future donations. Even from a marketing and publicity angle alone, building a game that raises funds for microfinance, AIDs, etc would be a win for any established charity.

Even if the game is a social business that just donates X% of their profits to charity, that would be a win in my book. Something is better than nothing.

Is anyone thinking about this? Has anyone already done it? Why don’t a few well funded organizations with synergies band together on a project like this and share in the overhead?

If I could either play Farmville for X hours or play FightPovertyNow for X hours and also raise Y dollars for Kiva in the process? Um, tough one, but I THINK I’d play FightPovertyNow. I hope you would too…

It’s amazing what the Khan Academy is aspiring to, and what they’ve already accomplished. Now, we just need to figure out how to get computers to the rest of the world so they can consume these online lessons.

Please show your support if you can!

Hat tip to Brad Coy for pushing the cause.

I’ve come to realize there are two areas of philanthropy that are the most interesting to me: microfinance and education. Microfinance is an unbelievably powerful tool, but I still believe a quality primary education is the cornerstone to succeeding in life. Education is something we take for granted here in the US; it’s almost a given that kids will get a decent education, even if they don’t go on to attend college and get an advanced degree. If you’re reading this, you probably had no trouble attending school growing up, and probably even have a college degree. News flash – that’s not the reality around the world. In much of the developing world, schools just don’t exist or are not accessible. Sometimes, kids can’t attend school because they don’t have the money to pay for uniforms (I saw a few of these kids in Kenya and it’s absolutely heartbreaking). The picture below was taken while touring a refugee camp with Rocky on one of my most memorable days of my month long stay in Kenya last fall. Don’t they deserve the opportunity to get an education just like you and me?

Where is this post going you might ask? Some friends and I are going to raise money to build a school somewhere in the 3rd world. We’re thinking the location will be Kenya, but not 100% sure as of yet. We were told by Free the Children that a school is, on average, $8,500 to build. So we’re about to start raising the funds. If you want to help change the lives for an entire community for what we consider to be pocket change and get involved, let me know in the comments or email me. I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to enable people to donate online to this specific project (if you know of a solution that could work, please let me know). We don’t have an exact timeline, but my initial goal would be to raise enough funds within 8-12 months. If we raise enough funds to build a school in 3 months? Awesome. Then we can just move on and build another one — there’s no shortage of need out there, just funds.

To start the project, I’m putting $250 toward the school, and $50 per month going forward. Anything you can do to help is greatly appreciated. I’ll continue to post updates here as we make further progress, and pick a specific location to support.

We all have free time. But the amount of time wasted each and every day by so many of us is insane; I am completely floored at the sheer number of people who give enough of a crap about Charlie Sheen to follow his every move in the media. 2.7 million followers on Twitter? Are you kidding me? Enough of spending time on things that don’t matter; let’s do something that actually matters with our free time and change lives in the process.

What can you do:

• Spread the word & ask friends for support
• Blog about it
• Donate directly
• Email me with questions or ideas

PS: If you don’t want to put funds toward this project, I’m not going to hold it against you. There are no shortage of people trying to raise money for various causes, and I realize everyone has their own philanthropic interests to support. It doesn’t have to be education or microfinance — all I ask is that you do SOMETHING to better the lives of others.

A little more context coming soon

This blog is a space for stories written by students from Zapotitlán’s middle school (grade 7-9) who are transforming their reality word by word.

It seems like a very cool project, and one I think could easily be expanding to other geographic areas and being used to bring more awareness to the issues students face all over the globe on a daily basis.

The mother and father in this sidewalk family are both lame, crippled by polio, and they live with their healthy five-year-old son on a spot originally settled by the husband’s parents. The husband makes a living darting in and out of the heavy traffic of the street next to the sidewalk where they live, washing car windshields for twenty-five paisa (and half a US penny). He occasionally washes taxis at a taxi stand down the street. His wife, who gets around on two crutches, earns money stringing and selling marigold garlands.

The couple and their child live with no shelter. When it rains hard in the monsoon season, they move to a nearby park where they attach a tarpaulin to a fence and weight the sides down with rocks. Each morning, they and other sidewalk dwellers life a heavy steel manhole cover above a major city water-delivery channel, and members of the entire community of pavement dwellers lift water by rope and bucker for an hour or two. The parents in this family go to the toilet in a public lavatory in the park, but their five-year-old son squats down in the gutter next to their sidewalk home and defecates there, with the encouragement of his mother. At his age, it may be too difficult to train him to use the toilet in the park.

Imagine a life like that. I don’t have any specific purpose for this post other than to make you consider the question of “What are you doing to make the world a better place, and increase the chances that stories like this become less common/acceptable?”

I hope this story sticks; it certainly did for me.

To THIS (a framed structure with a tin roof and siding that can withstand the rain)

If you want to fund construction of one of these homes for $765, you can head over the the Global Volunteer Network and learn more about Pipeline IDP. Once the materials are purchased, the home can be constructed in just two days. Here is a video with more about the Pipeline IDP:

It’s truly amazing that a mere $765 can make such a huge difference in the lives of an entire family, and after meeting the kids in the community, I can’t help but want to try to help.

Why don’t more companies operate this way? The world would certainly be a better place if they did.

[via A VC]