Flew in last night and am getting ready for Affiliate Summit. I am particularily interested in meeting up with people in the financial services space - especially those looking to run the Cash Central payday loan offer. I will be attending the meet and greet and the ice-breakers meetings this afteroon & evening.
I decided to profile the works of some great social entrepreneurs.
Kailash Satyarthi has saved tens of thousands of lives. At the age of 26 he gave up a promising career as an electrical engineer and dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery by powerful and corrupt business- and land-owners. His original idea was daring and dangerous. He decided to mount raids on factories — factories frequently manned by armed guards — where children and often entire families were held captive as bonded workers.
After successfully freeing and rehabilitating thousands of children, he went on to build up a global movement against child labor. Today Kailash heads up the Global March Against Child Labor, a conglomeration of 2000 social-purpose organizations and trade unions in 140 countries.
Yet even as he has become a globally recognized figure, Kailash continues the gritty work of leading raids to free slaves. Kailash believes that he must focus on a range of activities — from the most grassroots to the most visionary — in order to win the fight.
The above quoted from:
Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.
- Bill Drayton
We are still in the planning stages of our new project, Maya Jade, but I have to admit I can’t recall being more excited about a project. The basic idea behind the project is to take humanitarian expeditions down to Guatemala (other countries to follow) and allow the volunteers to participate on a wide range of service projects ranging from health and education to gardening and micro-enterprise. We have a million ideas flowing through our heads about how we want to tackle this new project. I am particularily excited about the potential use of the internet and social networking to grow support for our cause. The production of a top class website for Maya Jade is going to be crucial to our success. I envision expedition participants logging onto the website prior to the expedition and sending out customizable greeting cards to their friends and families inviting them to join or sponsor the expedition. Likewise after the expeditions I can envision them uploading their own photos and again sending out greeting cards - this time telling about their experience and once again encouraging them to get involved. I would hope past participants would be excited to promote the foundation via adding their trip photos to flickr, creating myspace and squidoo pages about their trip and even youtube videos. Of course, we would also have past participants have blogs on the website chronicling their trips. The website will also need to be very user friendly for donations and spell out customized monthly sponsorhip opportunities.
As I just read on Ashoka: “All ideas must be user-friendly, understandable, ethical and capable of engaging wide spread support.” I’m thinking that a cms (content management system) will be best for Maya Jade - not sure if wordpress or mod x is the right choice. Anyway, I’m just anxious to get moving with this new project and would love to hear people’s ideas for social entrepreneurship and how to leverage social networking to grow a cause.
McCoy told you the other day that he and I have formed a new non profit called Maya Jade. We have a lot of big plans for this new venture that will hopefully combine my background in leading tour groups to Latin America with his business savvy and result in some great service opportunities for the volunteers who choose to accompany us on this great adventure.
Anyway, today I stumbled across an intriguing list of non profits who are excelling at using the internet to further their causes. I hope to learn from each of these oranizations.