Each project is the beginning of a story...

You might think of us as a marketplace for giving, but we are also a set of tools for building a giving community, both on your street and around the world. Each project is the beginning of a story - an opening line of some great unwritten tale. We have our heroes (social entrepreneurs), our villians (disease, unjustice, poverty, you-name-it), and every reader is also a novelist. We buy the next volume each time we donate, but we also write the next chapter when we comment on projects, updates from the field, and tell others about a project by email, on Facebook, CouchSurfing, LinkedIn, or whatever your flavor of friend-manager happens to be.

That is from a very nice post over at our GlobalGoodness blog by Marc Maxson.  (I urge you read the whole thing.)

GlobalGiving is often called the world's leading marketplace for online giving.  But in reality, the extraordinary giving culture in the US is based on community rather than merely one-off transactions.  People to give to causes and initiatives in their local community, and people often give to things their friends recommend. 

GlobalGiving is leveraging the web to enable people across the world to connect around shared passions and concerns. Keep an eye out for new community features to in the months ahead.  And if there is anything specific you would like to see, send it to us.

[GlobalGiving]

I was wrong

"I was wrong."

Those words are rarely heard, especially in Washington. But earlier this year, I attended a breakfast meeting with Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard University. The title of his talk was something along the lines of "Three Significant Areas Where I Was Wrong." Larry is not a modest guy. But his talk made a big impression on me. It showed that he cared about the facts and about the truth, and that he was willing to change his mind based on evidence.

Today, Alan Greenspan joined Larry:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

A willingness to change one's mind based on the evidence, and not on ideology or preconceptions, is something we need a lot more of in this world.

[GlobalGiving]

Cutting to the chase

Poverty is bad. How’s that for over-simplification of a complex issue?

That is from a very nice blog post by Laura P. Thomas. She goes on to say:

When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man.

Sometimes complexity obscures and simplification illuminates. If you want to get a simple primer on why we should invest more in women and girls, read this post.

[GlobalGiving]

Focusing on the long view...

 

This graph comes from a blog post by Michael Clemens over at CGD.  Michael points out that short term shocks, while potentially severe, do not interrupt long term growth in well functioning economies.  The real  question, he writes, is how to ensure that economies are well functioning.

[GlobalGiving]

How to skin the Eco Cat

There are a thousand ways to skin the eco cat; and many of them are full of contradictions. We have to try to be comfortable with this complexity and realise that it is a moving feast. 

That is from a commencement speech by Galahad Clark at the London College of Fashion.  Galahad is the founder of Terra Plana -- an "ethical" shoe company in the UK.  In his speech, he talks about how using materials that seem to be eco-friendly may sometimes actually consume more energy or create more waste than traditional products.  

I have to say that I really like my Terra Plana "Vivo Barefoot Dharmas," and I am depending on Galahad to keep my feet eco-friendly.

[GlobalGiving]

How to find the best ideas

Ten years ago, Mari Kuraishi and I launched the first-ever Innovation Marketplace at the World Bank.  The idea was that any team of staff, without regard to rank or title, could submit an idea for doing good, and that we would award $3 milion to the most promising ideas.  There were few rules and little bureaucracy: in fact, proposals were limited to a couple of pages.

In May 1998, 121 teams set up booths in the atrium of the World Bank, and they each got fifteen minutes to pitch their ideas to a roving jury panel, which announced its decision within a couple of days.  The quality of the ideas was exceptional, and about half of the ideas funded (including the development of an aids vaccine and an initiative to help countries better prepare for natural disasters) became major strategic initiative for the Bank over the next 18 months.  This method of sourcing ideas helped the real innovators leap-frog the usual bureacracy.

But what struck me most was an encounter I had at the end of the Innovation Marketplace.  I saw a fairly senior and respected Bank economist crying.  I asked him what was wrong and he told me that his idea was something he had been tossing around for years - but he could never get anyone to listen to it until that day.  He had not won any funding, but at least he had been heard, and in fact he had met someone else with a similar idea, and they were going to go work on it together.

So Mari and I thought:  "Imagine:  If it was so hard for a World Bank economist to have his ideas heard, what does that say about people outside the Bank, including in the developing world?"  So we decided to run the event again, but this time to open it up to everyone in the world.  We changed the name to the Development Marketplace.  The results were again outstanding, with 300 teams participating from around the world.  We awarded over forty grants totalling $5 million.

After the event, one of my Bank colleagues remarked, "Wow, these ideas are extraordinary.  Did you see the creativity?  The innovation?  The energy?  The commitment?  We should operate like this all the time."  And one of the participants, a woman from South Africa, came up and asked when the real "market"was going to start.  When I asked her what she meant, she said, "Well just because the World Bank didn't fund my idea doesn't mean there aren't others out there who would fund it."

Those experiences, described by Gary Hamel and Robert Wood in the Harvard Business Review, were what led Mari and me to leave the World Bank and start GlobalGiving.  I am pleased that the market is working well, with over $12 million of funding mobilized for good ideas from thousands of individual donors and leading companies.  In a year where philanthropy is likely to be flat, we are growing by 300%.

During an interview today, I was asked if the general idea was catching on more broadly.  I said yes, and gave a couple of examples, including a request by one of the largest aid agencies for us to help them adopt a more open-access, bottom-up approach.  The World Bank has also done more than sixty additional marketplaces around the world, including another in Washington this week.  (See this great report by Marc Maxson on some amazing things he saw there.)  

If I had seen this announcement by Google that they are going to do their own $10 million development marketplace ala the World Bank, I would have included them as one of my examples. 


[GlobalGiving]

GlobalGiving Launches in the UK

Last Monday, GlobalGiving UK launched its brand new web site in London at a big gathering of NGO, private sector, and government leaders.  This is particularly exciting since UK donors are among the most generous and progressive in the world when it comes to supporting causes overseas.

The creation of GlobalGiving UK has been supported financially by the Charities Aid Foundation's Venturesome Fund and the Travel Foundation, with key advice and operational support from Google, Expedia UK, Paypal, and Isango.  Booz and Company hosted the launch on Monday and provided office space in the start up phase.  The GlobalGiving US team worked overtime to provide back-end services and adapt the front-end website to the UK context.

Minister Shahid Malik of DFID (the UK's aid agency) gave the keynote speech and made the first donation through the site, which speaks volumes.  DFID is at the very top of official aid agencies in terms of innovation and leadership in key areas.

The GG UK team is outstanding.

It is headed up by Sharath Jeevan, who has the kind of eclectic background that makes him specially suited for the job.  Most recently, he ran eBay's charity division in the UK.  Previously,  he has worked at the international NGO ActionAid, been a project leader at Booz Allen, and has even done a high-tech startup in Asia.  Having grown up near London, Sharath has an economics degree from Cambridge, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and graduate degree in creative writing from Oxford.

UK team members include Rachel Smith, who heads up relationships with NGOs and campaigns, Svetlana Gitman, Tanya Serov, Ann Dugan and Becky Hill - all of whom have played key roles in the launch.   

We at GlobalGiving US are proud of our new cousins in London.  But we are a little nervous, too.  They have already introduced a couple of key innovations that we don't have on our own site :)

[GlobalGiving]

Fighting Violence with Generosity – and Opportunity

Each year as we mark the anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, people wonder what they, as individuals, can do to mitigate the consequences of terrorism.

Conventional thinking encourages us to rely on our government to respond to terrorism and extremist acts - though foreign policy, military action, bilateral talks. But when it comes to private citizens, the only guidance we have been given is "go shop".

I prefer Gene Steuerle's approach. Gene lost his wife when her plane was crashed into the Pentagon. He was humbled and moved by what he saw as an outpouring of goodwill toward families who had lost loved ones.

Based on that experience, Gene decided that he and other 9/11 families should send a message to the world: peaceful collaboration and opportunity are among our best antidotes to terrorism over the long term.

Whether it's fast tracking education for Afghan women and girls, financing microlending in rural Afghanistan, or establishing health clinics in Pakistan, Americans who want to play a role in combating terrorism over the long term can make a donation and give people opportunity and hope.

Visionary philanthropy like Gene's can help create the conditions that make it much harder for extremist networks to take root. And the good news is that it costs a lot less than guns and bombs.

So far, the US government has allocated more than $500 billion for the military "war on terror." This is around $10,000 for each citizen of Iraq and Afghanistan.

By contrast, using Gene's "Safer and More Campassionate World" approach, a mere $100 can provide 56 Afghan women with basic healthcare and health education. And that amount is within reach of nearly all of us.



[GlobalGiving]

World Bank "Menu" of Green Opportunities?

Yesterday the Center for Global Development (CGD) invited me to make some remarks on the World Bank's forthcoming Climate Change Strategy.

The previous World Bank president nearly forbade the mention of the term "global warming." But Bob Zoellick is now encouraging the Bank to play a leadership role.

The meeting was well attended, which was encouraging. In addition to senior World Bank and CGD staff, there were experts from the International Finance Corporation, Millennium Challenge Corporation, US EPA, US Treasury, US Department of the Interior, World Resources Institute, NRDC, National Wildlife Foundation, NOAA, World Watch, Johns Hopkins, Deutsche Bank and others.

I made the following points:

1. This is a global emergency.

2. It will take everyone in the room to solve it - not just the World Bank.

3. We cannot deal with it solely or even primarily by top-down mandates.

4. The issue is complex, but nothing will happen unless we cut through the complexity with some simple, clear, and catalytic approaches.

5. I used a World Bank example in Indonesia (the posting of signs in the town square saying what Bank funds were being used for), and the example of our voluntary scoring system on GlobalGiving Green as examples of simple things that can catalyze big changes in behavior.

6. I suggested that the Bank find something analogous. One option would be using a range of carbon shadow prices for their projects - and publishing the results. This would show, for example, that even though coal-fired plants may be cheaper financially, solar installations would be more profitable if the cost of carbon emissions were taken into account. The difference in the financial costs of the two approaches (for example, coal and solar) would be highlighted, and other aid donors could have a look and fund that difference if they wanted to. This approach would give other donors a "menu" of projects that they could subsidize to help fight climate change, and would not force all subsidized decisions to go through a centralized World Bank mechanism.

7. This approach could help mute the resistance the Bank is facing to mandatory use of carbon shadow prices in making actual project decisions. Instead, the Bank would highlight the cost of the cleaner alternatives and allow other donors to fund the gap on a voluntary basis. Different donors would fund different things according to their interests and resources. Rapidly growing private donors could join the fray to supplement the resources of official agencies. This approach may actually result in faster action, more funding, and more innovation than a mandatory, centralized approach that may never even get off the ground.

If only global warming were Lex Luthor...

David Wheeler from CGD sent me a link to this video of a short talk by Daniel Gilbert at PopTech! on why we are so slow to respond to global warming. I highly recommend it. 

(And if you have not read Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, you should - it is a fast, fun and provocative read.)

[GlobalGiving]