Working Solutions

Today features a nonprofit organization that serves the for-profit small business community in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Developed as a pilot program, before receiving its nonprofit status in 1999, Working Solution's supports entrepreneurs to start or grow successful local businesses. They provide microloans/ small business loans and long term business advising.

• Small business loans $5,000 up to $50,000
• Five years of post loan business coaching and advising
• Referrals to small business resources

Working Solutions strives to support microenterprise development in an effort to strengthen the local economy, create jobs and build strong communities. Having made it's 100th loan in April 2012 to a vintage furniture store, here's the organization's impact to date:

• Jobs Created: 313
• Entrepreneurs Educated: 8,182
• Funds Loaned: $3.254 million
• Repayment Rate: 97.64%
• Businesses graduated to conventional financing: 20
• Start-up Businesses: 51%
• Existing Businesses: 49%

And my favorite statistics... Entrepreneurs served:

• 64% women
• 39% minority
• 59% low-income

Fore more information, please visit Working Solution, here.

Kiva

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

 The organization was established by Matt and Jessica Flannery, after an inspiring trip to East Africa that revealed the successes of microfinance. In October 2005 the website launched, becoming the world's first person-to-person microlending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. "Since its birth, Kiva has grown from a small personal project to one of the world's largest microfinance facilitators, connecting entrepreneurs with millions of dollars in loans from tens of thousands of lenders around the world."

How It Works:

1. Lenders browse profiles on entrepreneurs in need and choose someone to lend to. When you lend, using PayPal or a credit card, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of their microfinance partners worldwide.
2. Kiva's microfinance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often the partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur's chance of success.
3. The entrepreneurs repay their loans. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.
4. When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.

Loans are usually 6 to 12 months.

Kiva offers many opportunities to keep up with their activities. Beyond lender emails, you can visit Kiva's blog to keep up with their most recent initiatives and read about experiences from the field on the Fellows blog.

The site, in addition to providing great information, it also provides visitors with form letters to invite friends to get involved. Plus there's are plenty of banners to spread the word on Kiva, let people know that you're involved, or feature some of Kiva's entrepreneurs. For more information please visit Kiva's website.

Unitus

Unitus, founded in 2000, is an international nonprofit organization working to reduce global poverty by increasing access to life-changing microfinance services.

In 2001, Unitus' founders traveled to Bangladesh to learn about Grameen Bank and meet its founder, Muhammad Yunus. The trip left the founders of Unitus convinced that microcredit was the key to large-scale poverty alleviation and they began their increased efforts to eliminate poverty.

Their goal is to reach the most people in need as quickly as possible. To do this, Unitus seeks out and partners with young, high-potential microfinance institutions (MFIs), helping them build capacity, attract capital, and achieve exponential growth. "Rather than directly providing microfinance services, Unitus connects the ambitious visionary social entrepreneurs  who lead our partner MFIs with the business expertise, capital investments, and innovative tools and services required to grow faster, dream bigger, and reach farther. Their success in turn provides hope and opportunity for thousands who would otherwise remain stuck in the downward cycle of poverty."

"Unitus believes in the inherent value of every global citizen. They see the potential of all individuals to change the world for the better, given the opportunity. They believe they can transform the future for million of the world's least fortunate by scaling up highly leverages, market-based approaches to fighting poverty using the power of microfinance. Once the working poor are no longer excluded from the resources and opportunities of the world's financial markets, they are empowered to realize their full potential, building stronger families, communities, and lives."

In just seven years the organization has helped their partners serve more than seven million clients. Unitus' goal is to help their partners extend their reach to 15 million families by 2010.

Unitus website is full of useful information about microfinance and their approach. For more information, including the various ways you can get involved please visit their website.

MicroPlace

Today's feature shows how contagious a good, and more importantly successful, idea can be. We continue our focus on micro-finance by featuring MicroPlace, an organization founded by Tracey Pettengill Turner after her inspiring experience working at Grameen Bank, (Monday's feature).

MicroPlace's mission is "to help alleviate global poverty by enabling everyday people to make investments in the world's working poor."  The organization merged with Ebay in 2006, creating a "synergy between Ebay's mission to provide economic opportunity and MicroPlace's vision to empower the working poor."

The process is simple and you can invest as little as $20. All you need to do is open an investment account, search the site to find an investment you're interested in, and invest with your paypal or bank account. Investors receive their money back and interest payments directly into the account they paid from. You can then re-invest or cash out.

As we've already seen, micro-finance allows those living in proving to help themselves and their community. MicroPlace provides a simple, user-friendly and inexpensive way for anyone to get involved in micro-finance. 

For more information please visit the MicroPlace website.

Acumen Fund

Acumen Fund is a nonprofit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. They "seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Acumen Fund's investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services- like health, water, housing and energy- through innovative, market-oriented approaches."

Established in 2001, with seed capital from the Rockfeller Foundation, Cisco Systems Foundation, and three individual philanthropists, the Acumen Fund believes something must be done to extend the benefits of the global economy to the world's population that lives on less than $4 a day. The fund uses philanthropic capital to make disciplined loans or equity- not grants- that yield financial and social returns. Financial returns received are used towards new investments.  To date, Acumen Fund has invested in India, East and South Africa, and Pakistan.

For more information on Acumen Fund's initiatives, and how you can get involved, please visit their website. Also visit the Acumen Fund Blog to learn more.

Whole Foods Market

Today marks the end of our week long focus on for-profit businesses who support the nonprofit sector. We've seen businesses who have implemented practices that are environmentally and socially responsible, businesses who have been inspired to help champion nonprofit causes, and businesses who work for nonprofit organizations. 

Today's feature, Whole Foods Market, is a chain of markets  specializing in natural and organic products and geared towards socially and environmentally conscious consumers. The company is being featured not only for its business practices, but also for the foundation it established to help the global community.

Whole Foods Market's commitment to community is evident. One of their core values is: 'Caring about our communities and our environment.' This means:

• Sustainable agriculture- by supporting organic farmers, growers, and the environment through their commitment to sustainable agriculture and by expanding the market for organic products
• Wise environmental practices- by respecting their environment- recycling, reusing, and reducing waste whenever possible.
• Community Citizenship- by recognizing their responsibility to be active participants in their local community. They give a minimum of 5% of their profits every year to a wide variety of community and nonprofit organizations.
• Integrity in all business dealings- by viewing their trade partners as allies in serving their stakeholders, treating them with respect, fairness, and integrity at all times.

Sustainability is a key focus of Whole Foods Market. Their vision of a sustainable future "means our children and grandchildren will be living in a world that values human creativity, diversity, and individual choice. Businesses will harness human and material resources without devaluing the integrity of the individual or the planet's ecosystems. Companies, governments, and institutions will be held accountable for their actions. People will better understand that all actions have repercussions and that planning and foresight coupled with hard work and flexibility can overcome almost any problem encountered. It will be a world that values education and a free exchange of ideas by an informed citizenry; where people are encouraged to discover, nurture, and share their life's passions."

The company has begun implementing this vision "by changing the way we think about the relationships between our food, supply, the environment, and our bodies." The realization of their vision can be divided into following:

• Holistic thinking in a conventional world
• Holistic actions for a sustainable world
• Healthy foods and healthy products begin at the source
• Sustainability beyond organic food
• Respect for all forms of life
• Education and Public Participation
• Regulation, enforcement, and accountability.

Beyond all this, Whole Foods Markets make a point of giving back to the communities they serve and the global community. At the local level, each store donates to area food banks and shelters. There are also several times a year when the stores host 5% Days,  5% of the day's net sales are donated to a local nonprofit or educational organization.

On the global level, the company has established the Whole Planet Foundation. The mission of the foundation is "to create economic partnerships with the poor in those developing-world communities that supply our stores with product. Through innovative assistance for entrepreneurship - including direct micro-credit loans and tangible support for other community partnership projects - [they] seek to unleash the energy and creativity of every human being [they] work with in order to create wealth and prosperity in emerging economies."

Whole Foods Market provides a large portion of the funding for the loans and underwrites the administrative costs so every dollar donated goes directly to those in need. The company also supports projects that directly relate to organics and environmentally-friendly production methods, animal welfare, sustainable seafood, and healthy families and nutrition.

Finally, should the need arise, Whole Foods Markets accepts donations at store cash registers for regional and national disasters.

Both the Whole Foods Market website and the Whole Planet Foundation website provide a wealth of information. For more information on Whole Foods Market's initiatives and how you can get involved please visit both sites.

International Development Enterprises

International Development Enterprises (IDE) is an international nonprofit organization, with affiliates in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Founded by Paul Polak, IDE has been helping poor farmers in developing countries for over 25 years.

The organization uses a market based approach that enables millions to permanently escape poverty. They use business principles to facilitate unsubsidized market systems in which the rural can can participate effectively as micro-entrepreneurs and earn income. IDE programs create an environment that helps these farmers progress from subsistence agriculture to commercial farming.

IDE maintains right country programs in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, areas marked by extreme poverty. These programs are in the following locations: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 

Please visit IDE's website for more information. The site provides a lot of great information, including success stories from IDE's programs.

You can now join IDE on facebook as well, click here to join the cause.

John Legend

John Legend's mostly known as a grammy winning, multi-platinum artist, but today it's his philanthropic work that's getting recognized. Listed below are the organizations Legend has founded or advocates for. Inspired to create songs about the tragedies in Africa, Legend took those words and decided words weren't enough. And now he encourages us to move beyond words toward action. Please check out this amazing organizations, and visit their sites to find out more information.

The Show Me Campaign - Launched in 2007, the organization works to improve the living situations and prospects of victims of extreme poverty in Mbola, Tanzania. The mission of the organization is, "to fight economic and spiritual poverty through fostering sustainable development (personal, social, education, economic) at the individual, family, and small community levels. The Show Me Campaign is grassroots movement that engages all of its participants as agents of transformative change from the bottom up."

The Campaign supports Mbola, a remote village in Tanzania, in an effort to permanently lift itself from extreme poverty. The Campaign works with Millennium Promise and the local Mbola community to implement practical solutions to advance its mission. I highly recommend visiting the Show Me Campaign's website to see an outline of the seven initiatives to help this village. They range from providing fertilizer to help farmers to education and internet. They  not only provide relief, but also offer sustainable solutions. These life-changing initiatives can be secured for just $60 per villager per year over 5 years. 

Millennium Promise - their mission "is to support the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty in Africa by 2015. To that end, Millennium Promise works with impoverished communities, national and local governments, and partner organizations to implement high-impact programs aimed at transforming lives on the continent and engaging donor nations, corporations, an the general public in the effort. Our work is premised on the belief that, for the first time in history, our generation has the opportunity to end extreme poverty, hunger, and disease." They envision the end extreme worldwide poverty by 2025.

"Millennium Development Goals are the world's time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion- while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They are also basic human rights- the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security." 

These eight goals are:

• Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty
• Achieve Universal Primary Education
• Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
• Reduce Child Mortality
• Improve Maternal Health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
• Ensure Environmental Sustainability
• Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) - a national nonprofit that develops African American, Hispanic and Native American young people for leadership positions in corporations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurial ventures where these minority groups are under-represented. The organization partners with MBA programs and blue-chip corporations to provide programming at critical career transition points: high school to college, college to early career, early career to MBA, and MBA to executive leadership. MLT provides high-potential minority talent with the skills needed to succeed. To date the organization has over 300 Career Prep alumni and 500 MBA Prep alumni.

The Gentlemen's Fund -  an initiative established in 2007 to commemorate GQ's 50th anniversary. The Fund has partnered with five charities and five celebrity ambassadors to support the five cornerstones essential to men: Opportunity, Health, Education, Environment, and Mentorship. As an ambassador, John Legend, raises support and awareness for organizations that embody these five principles.

For more information about these organizations, their work and how you can help please visit their websites.

The Heifer Project

In 1944, Dan West founded the Heifer Project with the hope of ending hunger by providing a source of food, rather than a short-term remedy.  More than 60 years later, the organization has served millions of families in 128 countries.

Their mission is simple: to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth. Their strategy is simple: have people share their animals offspring with others, in other words, "pass on the gift."

Passing on the Gift means that each family receiving a heifer, (a young cow that hasn't yet given birth), agrees to donate the female offspring to another family in need. Thus the gift of food is never ending.

Since it's start the organization has expanded its initiatives to advance its mission. These initiatives include: Agroecology, Animal Well-Being, Gender Equity, HIV/AIDS, Micro-enterprise, Urban Agriculture, and Young People's Initiatives.

The website is filled with information on the various programs and the many ways you can get involved. Please visit the site to learn more.