Preamble
In my short life, I feel like I've been a pretty lucky guy. Grew up in a nice neighborhood, nice home cooked meals everyday, roof under my head, good friends, and hey, even a few nice girls.
Growing up in all this wealth gotta make you wonder how you ever got to be in the place you are. My personal belief is that it's the community, friends and family that has gotten me this far and let enjoy all these nice things in life.
Basically, it's people. Kinda of makes you want to give back a bit, doesn't it?
So I look around me, and well...I won't lie, it seems like we got a lot of bases covered here in Canada. So I apply my awesome commerce degree and put my head to the grinding stone.
Charities: egh..give poor incentives, and you never quite know how your hard earned dollars are being spent
Community Work: Third World Countries are too far away
The answer?
My friends, I present to you the lovely www.kiva.org.
Kiva.org applies the concepts of Micro Financing first pioneered by Nobel prize winner Mohammed Yunus is the basic of idea giving poor people small loans so they can help themselves out of poverty and work towards self-sufficiency.
This idea was first practiced through physical banks, but with the advent of the internet and social media, things changed.
Before Kiva, it was very difficult if not impossible for an individual to make a loan to another in need. This was because of the high risk, the limited access to reliable information, the high costs and most glaringly the lack of an institution.Kiva used Social Media to enable thousands of donors to organize into a cohesive entity to help support and fund third world entrepreneurs through safe, small, and trusted means.With their innovative web out lay, they created a community that competes in donations and tracks all of your donations against those of others. Furthermore, users can independently customize there searches for who they would like to fund, based on gender, country, and more.
So, if you ever feel like throwing in your two bits, check this site out
http://kivaworld.com/
http://www.kivadata.org/
A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.
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