People give to people: meet the global intermediaries

One of the disincentives to making donations to big charities tackling big problems is you don’t know where your money goes. There’s seldom a clear link between the human stories presented in the appeal, and the people who may benefit from your assistance.

Today GlobalGiving.co.uk launches an online system which changes that:

… enabling individuals to give directly to hundreds of well-vetted grassroots charity projects in over 70 countries, mostly in the developing world. Donors can also tangibly see the impact of their donations on the communities concerned through regular progress updates from project leaders. Projects range from providing clean water to villages in Morocco, enabling Guatemalan women to set up small-scale businesses, or helping Nepalis produce pedal-generated light as an alternative to dirty kerosene lamps.

(read more...)

Explaining the world through a village

I find it difficult to really connect with statistics on world poverty, literacy, and economics. Human stories are compelling, but don’t give an idea of scale. That’s why I think the little book If the World Were a Village, by David J. Smith, is so clever in bringing the figures to life. As the back cover says, if the world were a village of just 100 people (rather than 6 billion) then:

• 22 people speak a Chinese dialect
• 20 earn less than 65p a day
• 17 cannot read or write
• only 30 always have enough to eat
• 25 have a television in their homes

I can understand that, and so it seems can many others, because about one million copies of the book have sold, with 18 foreign language editions. (read more...)

Organise social reporters? Up to a point.

I’m delighted that the idea of social reporting, which I first floated a couple of years ago,  is taking off without much promotion from me. Maybe there’s something in it. My friend Paul Henderson of Ruralnet came up with this admirably brief definition, applauded by Nancy White, and Bev Trayner has posted a thoughtful analysis of the role, about which more later. (read more...)

Leadership 2.0: step forward the unheros

Jemima Gibbons from David Wilcox on Vimeo.

Earlier this year David Gurteen gave us a neat summary of how new online tools and attitudes (Web 2.0) are changing the way we do business, learn and socialise. World 2.0 has arrived, and requires a different mindset:

We are moving from a simple world to a rich, complex, diverse one. One where power is less centralized and more distributed. We are moving from a command and control world to a world where people can do as they please within the boundaries of responsibility.

David summarised World 1.0 and World 2.0 in the chart below. This is the world of both small-scale social innovation – and also new-style open, corporate innovation supported by NESTA Connect.

Jemima Gibbons spotted this a couple of years ago when lecturing at Cass Business School, and something clicked. Academics were talking about new more dispersed, distributed forms of leadership, Web 2.0 was emerging as a meme … so what we will need is Leadership 2.0. (read more...)