Filed under: CHAMPs News | Tags: ashoka, aviva, fairchild leisuretalk, skyrocketkids, takingitglobal
It has been WAY too long since my last post here. I have to apologize to everybody for the extended absence but the Aviva competition just took every ounce of energy I had. With your help we made it to the finals, so THANK YOU everybody for your support! In 14 days (on Jan 25th) we will know if we won the $10k that we asked for. Here’s keeping our fingers crossed.
Regardless of whether we win the money or not the competition has been a great way for us to reach out and connect with others in the community. We have fostered a relationship with SkyRocketKids (another Aviva participant), have plans to partner with our old friends at TakingITGlobal more in the future, and will hopefully be meeting with Celia Cruz of Ashoka Canada sometime in the next 2 weeks. Furthermore, FairChildTV has contacted us to participate in their LeisureTalk show, so hopefully later in Feb we’ll have some exciting TV clips to share!
In the meantime we have been plowing away with CHAMPS character illustrations so I hope to post some of those on here shortly to get your feedback.
Happy New Year everyone!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: aviva community fund, charity champs funding, voting
12 more hours of voting on the Aviva Community Fund! A scant 290 votes are keeping us in the top 25, even with our strongest day yet in voting yesterday. WE NEED YOUR HELP BADLY. We estimate that we need a surge of 500 votes to carry us through.
Tis the season to be generous, so if there’s ever a time to ask for a few seconds of help, now is it.
Don’t just ask a few people stand up, we challenge you to ask a group, a class, a team, a club, a department, a neighbourhood, or a family to help bring to light an innovative new idea that will someday touch hundreds of thousands of people.
One teacher said it best: “I spend my days teaching kids, and almost every class I teach revolves around information we find on-line or material we put there. During their free time, my kids spend hours a day on-line. This has to be one of the most significant changes in the way kids currently spend their free time and how they gather information. This is new in the past decade. This Charity Champs idea is directly connected to both where kids are and how kids gather information. It has almost a guaranteed chance of being successful.”
TODAY IS THE DAY. MAKE A HUGE CHRISTMAS DREAM COME TRUE!
It’ll only take a few minutes, and the instructions are here:
http://www.charitychamps.org/how-to-vote.pdf
And the usual vote for the spirit of giving!
1. Go to the voting page here: http://bit.ly/57twO
2. Click on Vote and leave a COMMENT.
3. Update your facebook status or email a friend reminding them to do the same!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: avivai community fund, globosocial adventures, rizwan tayabali
With all the voting hubbub going on for Charity CHAMPS voting on ACF I have met lots of people interested in microphilanathropy, and have been in some very stimulating conversations about social innovation. One great place to visit for social innovation information is the Globosocial Adventures Blog, written by Rizwan Tayabali. Rizwan is a management and social enterprise consultant who has a job that I envy – he’s currently traveling around the world working with social enterprises in different cultures and economies, trying to understand how we can design better global support systems for social start-ups and small social enterprises.
If you read his blog you’ll get a mix of cultural experience stories and notes about his meetings with social entrepreneurs around the world, such as the Ashoka Mexico team. He’s been kind enough to offer his support for Charity CHAMPS, and has an open call to anybody out there involved with social enterprise – if you think he can help at all with what you’re doing, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Charity CHAMPS’ mission is to get more people doing good in small ways. The small actions all add up, after all, to big things, and if you follow this blog, you will have seen the staggering growth numbers of organizations doing “microphilanthropy”.
I’m not one for big words, but I do like the word “microphilanthropy”. It makes natural sense to me – “small good”. And with others like Peter Deitz from Social Actions also using the word, I thought it would be appropriate to throw Charity CHAMPS behind it as well. From as far back as 2006 people have been blogging and saying that “microphilanthropy” is the next up-and-coming word. But if I had a penny for every time when I get a blank look for using the word, Charity CHAMPS might not need to apply to the Aviva Community Fund for funding. It seems that “philanthropy” on its own isn’t widely understood, let alone with “micro” in front of it.
It is a word though, I swear! It even has a wikipedia entry. I’m just not sure that it’s the right word to associate Charity CHAMPS with. While discussing with an SEO expert on what keywords we want to be aligned with, this question came up, and the unfortunate fact is, if we don’t use this word, the other options are slim pickings. “Micro-actions”? “Micro-giving”, at the obvious risk of sounding just like microgiving.com? Industry standards like “volunteer” just don’t sound sexy to me by comparison, but maybe that’s just what we need.
Thoughts?
Filed under: CHAMPs News | Tags: aviva, community, fund, micro philanthropy, Microphilanthropy, vote, youth
Today is day 3 of Round 2 of the Aviva Community Fund up in Canada. The slogan of the competition is “Supporting what’s important to you”. Charity CHAMPS is promoting microphilanthropy amongst youth, the most important, but least engaged demographic in philanthropy. That’s important to us!
Also unlike a lot of the other ideas competing for votes, ours has a fundamental online and micro-action foundation which we think there needs to be more of. Philanthropy needs to benefit from the huge changes in technology like every other industry!
If any of these things are important to you (and we hope they are), please vote for us. The money is going to be critical for us hitting targets we’ve set for ourselves!
Vote here:
http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf2300
Check out the new video on our site:
http://www.charitychamps.org/
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: david roodman, kiva, kiva donor illusion, kiva scam, microcredit, microfinance
If you’ve been following the debate surrounding whether microcredit works or not you’ll be interested to read A Mostly Comprehensive Guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion Debate, written earlier this month. While I’ve written several articles on this blog about microcredit and its impacts on third world communities, I have never focused in on any particular microcredit organization, and if you could only analyze one it would obviously be Kiva.
Kiva, the popular lending site that boasts over $27M in loans disbursed, is being critized for misleading users to believe that peer-to-peer connections exist when in fact there are intermediary lenders in the process. In the article Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems, microfinance expert David Roodman cites examples of borrowers recieving money before any Kiva loan has established. And while Kiva doesn’t hide this information, it also doesn’t do much to make the fact clear. Of course, in cases like this it’s hard to put the blame on any one party – communication is 2-way, so who’s to say that it’s not the donors who are misleading themselves?
In the end, the question to ask is: does it matter? Kiva helps get money to entrepreneurs, and most importantly, Kiva makes donors feel good. Donors become educated, and are more involved with the issues plaguing various third world countries. And on this point I think most microfinance critics actually are in agreement – Kiva isn’t all bad.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: canadian athletes now fund, canadian microphilanthropy, toques & beavers
If you follow this blog you’d know that I’m always on the look-out for online microphilanthropies with a Canadian bent (I am Canadian afterall). For the most part I actually don’t think it really matters where the microphilanthropy is based, but sometimes it does affect whether as a Canadian I can participate in the programs, and other times it affects whether Canadian charities are the beneficiaries or not.
So I was quite delighted to discover Toques & Beavers. The site runs a trivia game similar to FreeRice, that not only educating Canadians but also to raises money for the Canadian Athletes Now Fund by taking donations. It focuses so much on Canadiana that it’s hilarious; the trivia is all Canadian trivia, the prizes are Toques & Beaver themed, and their slogan is “Eh! to Zed”. When you get a trivia question right, a beaver (in a toque, of course) pops up to congratulate you. It doesn’t get better than that. Check it out, and see how close you can get to the top score of 917000 currently held by campbellgary. And don’t forget to connect your account with Facebook so that the world could see how good you are at Canadian trivia.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: does microcredit work, does microlending fit poverty, grameen bank, microcredit, microfinance, microlending, mit microlending studies
On this blog I’ve written two previous posts on microfinance (also known as microcredit or microlending) and its effects. Well the debate regarding whether microlending solves poverty still rages on, and this month, the Boston Globe published a fairly extensive article containing much supporting material that concludes microfinance doesn’t actually do much to alleviate poverty. If you’re interested in the subject I would definitely recommend you read the article; while it doesn’t include ideas that are entirely new, it does quote findings from MIT research yet to be published, and offers a good summary into arguments being made on both sides.
So what exactly are some arguments against microlending being effective for alleviating poverty? Well..
- Studies are showing that microlending doesn’t lift household spending (an indicator that shows financial well-being)
- Borrowers often do not use the borrowed money for business but instead spend on household items like TVs
- New research underlies the fact that developing countries will not lift themselves out of poverty through fueling entreprenurship – already developing countries are overindexed on entreprenurs, and what the countries need is large corporations to provide jobs that steadily increase pay annually
- Economies of scale work, and microlending doesn’t tap that potential; as the article says, “Forty workers at a textile plant are going to be much more productive than 40 microentrepreneur weavers each working by themselves”
Of course, on the flip side, there are also arguments to be made:
- If nothing else, microlending is allowing borrowers to disengage from high-interest lending that can result in physical punishment if loans are not repaid
- Studies that have been conducted so far only measure the impact of microcredit on the short term and don’t take into account effects over 2 years long
- The growth and sustainability of microlending (Grameen Bank, has disbursed more than $8 billion in unsecured loans) suggests that borrowers are finding value in the loans, even if the effects cannot be immediately measured
Filed under: General Charity Musings | Tags: 10tothe100, Google 10^100, vote for projects
Google’s looking to help as many people as possible, and launched the 10^100 project to take ideas. They gathered all the ideas, grouped them into categories, and is taking votes until tomorrow to help decide which world saving projects will receive a portion of their $10M funding.
So if you haven’t yet, visit the site at http://www.project10tothe100.com and vote while you still can! Some categories include:
- Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
- Work toward socially conscious tax policies
- Drive innovation in public transport
- Create real-world issue reporting system
Personally I can’t decide amongst all the education options, they all sound good. But I will pick something before the deadline! Let me know if you have a top pick.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: digital music charity, fundtunes, raise money with music
Do you buy digital music online? If so, you should check out FundTunes. FundTunes is a recently launched site that is partnered with Universal Music Canada to sell digital music for the benefit of charities. Nonprofits get $3.00 per 10-song bundle and $1.50 from each 5-song bundle that you buy. Currently listed nonprofits include MADD, Best Buddies, WhiteCrow Village, and Canadian Cancer Society. And if you’re looking to donate to a specific nonprofit but can’t find the organization listed, all you have to do is email FundTunes to get the listing process started.
If you’re a nonprofit, using FundTunes gives you a novel way of fundraising, where you get 50% of the proceeds from music sales. It’s also super easy because you’ll receive an online music store, ready to be used as part of a campaign. There are no upfront costs.
