Originally posted at HuffingtonPost by our co-founder, Dennis Whittle

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it looks like the carbon-intensive industries are likely to face either a tax on carbon or a market for buying and selling emissions allowances in coming years. But it is not just power plants and large manufacturing facilities that contribute to climate change. All of us are accountable for some level of emissions–begging the question, how can you account for what your organization produces?

A popular answer is carbon offsets–essentially funding a reduction in emissions or increase in carbon storage somewhere so that you can continue emitting carbon here. Although offsets have been widely embraced, the actual amount of carbon kept from entering the atmosphere is often questioned. OK, it will help plant trees. But where? By whom? And will they live the 20+ years necessary to accomplish their offsetting purpose?

An alternative for skeptics is to fund projects that have received the climate-friendly “Green Leaf” designation on our online philanthropic marketplace, GlobalGiving. Our site features smaller environmental and social projects from around the world, letting you find opportunities you would not otherwise discover. Project leaders post detailed project descriptions so donors can see exactly what they’re funding. And donors on GlobalGiving can see directly the difference their donations are making through updates from the field.

Instead of quantifying offsets, we are encouraging individuals and organizations to take responsibility for their own emissions by helping these projects expand their reach. And, we are able to promote a much broader range of projects that address climate change. For instance, a project in Ecuador teaches tens of thousands of children about climate change and ways to combat it. We can’t translate this into tons of carbon, but it can result in a future generation of green voters, consumers, and policymakers. Other projects from the Environmental Foundation for Africa are working not only to provide solar electricity to schools in villages in Sierra Leone, but also to train technical school students in their installation and maintenance.

Encouraging the Third World to keep walking the same well-trodden carbon intensive path is ultimately unsustainable. As David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel of the Center for Global Development report, if nothing changes in the global South their cumulative contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will exceed that of the North within the coming decades. That means that even if developed countries cut their carbon emissions to zero, developing countries will face the same future–rising temperatures, more droughts and flooding, more frequent and intense storms, changing weather patterns.

And there’s no better time to donate to GlobalGiving Green projects than now - the Give a Little Green campaign is matching donations to these projects by 50% through April 28th or until matching funds are exhausted.
Thanks to Bill Brower for the research supporting this post.

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We’ve been on a bit of hiatus, trying to figure out if anyone actually reads this blog and how to make it useful to the GlobalGiving community at large.  The silence has been deafening.

So we’re throwing ourselves at the mercy of our handful of blog readers and asking the two- part question (pay attention lest you miss the two parts):

1. Should GlobalGiving have a blog and

2. If so, what would be worth your time reading?

Let me duck so I don’t get bombarded with the thousands of instantaneous comments.

Seriously, what do ya think?

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GlobalGIving’s work spans the world and that world includes “our own backyard”. Yesterday half of the staff at GlobalGiving ‘world headquarters’ headed out to serve dinner at the Central Union Mission here in Washington DC. 

The world came to our doorstep as we served men from Central America, Asia, Africa, Germany and of course DC.  The work at the mission is a stellar example of a project that solves the problems of homelessness, job training and support in a practical, hands on way.   Just the type of work and creative solutions that GlobalGiving thrives on. 

Huge shout out to Ray for accommodating our gang and for taking us under his wing in service of others.  His efficiency and caring were great models.

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Below is a very thoughtful and interesting review of our website done by Dr. Susan Weinschenk.  It’s almost as though she has been sitting in our User Experience conversations for the last 18 months.  We agree with Dr. Weinschenk’s observations and suggestions, and appreciate her insights.

This is why we are investing a tremendous amount of our 2009 firepower into redesigning the way in which project information gets onto our platform, so that the stories and media can more effectively be leveraged to help project leaders around the world raise needed funds.

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GlobalGiving is at its best when ordinary people find innovative ways to stretch their assets and spread the wealth. I want to give a shout-out to Appalachian State University student Maggie Osborn for hosting a “dread party” last week. By selling the opportunity to friends to put her hair in dreadlocks, Maggie raised $50 for GlobalGiving. These funds went directly to childhood malaria prevention deaths by providing insecticide treated bednets, malaria education, or treatment.

As a alumnus of AppState, I’m proud to see word about GlobalGiving getting out to the backcountry of Western North Carolina. Appalachian State is nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains and isolated hamlets. When I lived there, the “Democratic Party Headquarters” for Watauga county used to occupy a stray rail car on the side of a twisty mountain road between Boone and Blowing Rock, NC. That’s Appalachia for you. And yet one person can send money to buy dozens of bednets ten thousand miles away. Even better, that person can see the impact this donation makes in one village through GlobalGiving’s regular project updates.

In the “new economy” (a euphemism about as pleasant as “downsizing”), there are thrifty tricks to amplify your impact. Tell you friends. Even better, give your friends small gift cards to prime their giving impulses. Maggie probably learned about us because a friend or parent gave her a GlobalGiving gift card. That gift card combined with an idea she had sitting in a coffee shop and resulted in a new hair style and more bednets. Look at what one small invitation can do to get more money to people that need it most.

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Shared with us by friend and donor, Homa Tavangar.  Thank you Homa.

After the Thanksgiving meal with our big extended family we usually play games like Scattergories or watch a classic movie.  This year we tried something new.  Among various family members we’ve been talking with increasing concern about the state of the world, so with anyone who wanted to, we thought we’d “play” something more meaningful alongside our usuals.  We called it a “Giving Thanks Gathering.” This could just as easily take place on Boxing Day or New Year’s Day or another holiday the family all gathers.

About ten days before Thanksgiving I sent out an email to all the family members to see what they thought about doing a Giving Thanks Gathering, plugging in to the GlobalGiving.com website after our big turkey dinner, and choosing a cause to support as a group. I made it clear early on and throughout the ‘experience’ that no one would be pressured to play; this would not be a fundraiser, or a sort of pressure-to-give event, but more a learning experience and a chance for all of us as an extended family to talk about issues that we cared about and to share this with our kids.  The family responded with curiosity and enthusiasm.

Our plan was to plug in a laptop to the big TV and go on the GlobalGiving.com website all together.  We encountered a glitch when the new TV at my parents’ home wasn’t working correctly.  So instead, four of us happened to have our laptops there and we broke into four teams (simply based on where people happened to be sitting, with one laptop per team).  Each team logged on to the GlobalGiving website and started discussing what issue area they would like to support.  We knew this could take all day once the searching started, but we hadn’t had dessert yet and we needed to accommodate a wide range of ages, so we gave everyone fifteen minutes to come up with a recommendation that the entire group would then consider and vote on.  As the groups navigated the site, I heard the discussions around the computers get richer and more serious.  People were fascinated by the range of innovative programs and were drawn in by the desperate needs all over the world.  The biggest challenge in the process was to get people to decide on a project to recommend to the group for funding – they felt the needs were simply too big to narrow down their choices in a short time.  This itself was a great learning experience.  Finally, we decided on a program supporting girls’ education in Afghanistan.

Once we made the difficult choice to support a single project, we put a wooden box in the middle of the coffee table for whoever wanted to contribute an anonymous donation.  The youngest kids had been oriented in advance, so they brought their own money set aside from home, and then it was exciting to count the total from our group effort.  We emphasized that this wasn’t meant to replace personal philanthropic giving nor put anyone on the spot, and we wouldn’t pass around the collection box.  Our goal wasn’t to raise big money, but to give everyone a taste.  We raised $197, then, when we counted, my cousin’s 6-year old daughter ran to get her $3 and my bro-in-law gave his promised $0.27 worth to take us to a total of $200.27 (we also had lots of family jokes running through the process J).

The experience far surpassed my expectations.  One of the best surprises was the enthusiasm we had from the college-aged and younger adults in the family.  They were most stimulated by the exercise, appreciative that I had introduced it, enthusiastic to get everyone on board (and they are the best role models for the teens, tweens, and kids in our family).   Amidst homemade pecan, pumpkin, key lime, chocolate mousse, and chocolate pumpkin pies and my mom’s amazing chocolate-swirled cheesecake, conversations about the programs and the process continued across generations.  I noticed the next day one of the college students from our family had “… is GlobalGiving” as his Facebook status, and he told me he had continued to be inspired by the site and our little family activity – as were the rest of us.

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With the new administration coming to power in the US, there is a flurry of new proposals on how to reform the aid system.  However, few of them propose real change.  Instead, there are proposals to increase aid to such and such issue or country.  Or to strengthen such and such agency - or to appoint a strong new leader.

None of these proposals gets at the root of the problem.  As Bill Easterly has pointed out, we have spent more than $2 trillion in aid over the past fifty years with not enough to show for it.

The problem is the centrally planned, expert-driven, top-down nature of the current aid system.  Just like under the Soviet regime, this approach does get things done.  But the quality is bad, shortages are common, and the people have little say in what gets produced.

So let me propose the 2/3 : 1/3 rule.  Henceforth, 2/3 of all aid resources will be allocated through an open-access, bottom-up, market mechanism, while 1/3 of the resources will be allocated through existing top-down approaches.

I will write more about how the marketplace system would work in coming posts and columns.

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/[GlobalGiving]” rel=”tag”>[GlobalGiving]</a>

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What passes for the holiday season began before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, when a worker at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by a mob of bargain hunters. Afterward, there were reports that some people, mesmerized by cheap consumer electronics and discounted toys, kept shopping even after announcements to clear the store.

These are dark days in the United States: the cataclysmic stock-market declines, the industries edging up on bankruptcy, the home foreclosures and the waves of layoffs. But the prospect of an end to plenty has uncovered what may ultimately be a more pernicious problem, an addiction to consumption so out of control that it qualifies as a sickness. The suffocation of a store employee by a stampede of shoppers was horrifying, but it wasn’t entirely surprising.

Americans have been on an acquisition binge for decades. I suspect television advertising, which made me want a Chatty Cathy doll so much as a kid that when I saw her under the tree my head almost exploded. By contrast, my father will be happy to tell you about the excitement of getting an orange in his stocking during the Depression. The depression before this one.

A critical difference between then and now is credit. The orange had to be paid for. The rite of passage for a child when I was young was a solemn visit to the local bank, there to exchange birthday money for a savings passbook. Every once in a while, like magic, a bit of extra money would appear. Interest. Yippee.

The passbook was replaced by plastic, so that today Americans are overwhelmed by debt and the national savings rate is calculated, like an algebra equation, in negatives. By 2010 Americans will be a trillion dollars in the hole on credit-card debt alone.

But let’s look, not at the numbers, but the atmospherics. Appliances, toys, clothes, gadgets. Junk. There’s the sad truth. Wall Street executives may have made investments that lost their value, but, in a much smaller way, so did the rest of us. “I looked into my closet the other day and thought, why did I buy all this stuff?” one friend said recently. A person in the United States replaces a cell phone every 16 months, not because the cell phone is old, but because it is oldish. My mother used to complain that the Christmas toys were grubby and forgotten by Easter. (I didn’t even really like dolls, especially dolls who introduced themselves to you over and over again when you pulled the ring in their necks.) Now much of the country is made up of people with the acquisition habits of a 7-year-old, desire untethered from need, or the ability to pay. The result is a booming business in those free-standing storage facilities, where junk goes to linger in a persistent vegetative state, somewhere between eBay and the dump.

Oh, there is still plenty of need. But it is for real things, things that matter: college tuition, prescription drugs, rent. Food pantries and soup kitchens all over the country have seen demand for their services soar. Homelessness, which had fallen in recent years, may rebound as people lose their jobs and their houses. For the first time this month, the number of people on food stamps will exceed the 30 million mark.

Hard times offer the opportunity to ask hard questions, and one of them is the one my friend asked, staring at sweaters and shoes: why did we buy all this stuff? Did anyone really need a flat-screen in the bedroom, or a designer handbag, or three cars? If the mall is our temple, then Marc Jacobs is God. There’s a scary thought.

The drumbeat that accompanied Black Friday this year was that the numbers had to redeem us, that if enough money was spent by shoppers it would indicate that things were not so bad after all. But what the economy required was at odds with a necessary epiphany. Because things are dire, many people have become hesitant to spend money on trifles. And in the process they began to realize that it’s all trifles.

Here I go, stating the obvious: stuff does not bring salvation. But if it’s so obvious, how come for so long people have not realized it? The happiest families I know aren’t the ones with the most square footage, living in one of those cavernous houses with enough garage space to start a homeless shelter. (There’s a holiday suggestion right there.) And of course they are not people who are in real want. Just because consumption is bankrupt doesn’t mean that poverty is ennobling.

But somewhere in between there is a family like one I know in rural Pennsylvania, raising bees for honey (and for the science, and the fun, of it), digging a pond out of the downhill flow of the stream, with three kids who somehow, incredibly, don’t spend six months of the year whining for the toy du jour. (The youngest once demurred when someone offered him another box on his birthday; “I already have a present,” he said.) The mother of the household says having less means her family appreciates possessions more. “I can give you a story about every item, really,” she says of what they own. In other words, what they have has meaning. And meaning, real meaning, is what we are always trying to possess. Ask people what they’d grab if their house were on fire, the way our national house is on fire right now. No one ever says it’s the tricked-up microwave they got at Wal-Mart.

Original post can be found here

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The blogosphere is sometimes a clogosphere of people trying sound smart, witty, or cutting-edge. But if you get a chance, I recommend you check out this really clever guy named Lao Tse. He never blogged, but he was great at cutting to the chase. Here are his tips on good governance, which seem appropriate for these days of “global economic meltdown.”

Lao Tse wrote:

“When a country obtains great power, it becomes like the sea. All streams run downward into it. The more powerful it grows, the greater the need for humility. Humility means trusting in the Tao, and thus never needing to be defensive.[61]

A great nation should be like great man. When he makes a mistake, he should realize it. Having realized it, he should admit it. Having admitted it, he should correct it. He should consider those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He should think of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.[61]

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be. The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be.[57]

When man interferes with God, the sky becomes filthy. The Earth becomes depleted. The equilibrium crumbles. Creatures become extinct.[39]

For governing a country well, there is nothing better than moderation. The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas.[59] When the will to power is in charge, the higher the ideals, the lower the results. [58]

[Instead,] center your country on the way, and evil will have no power. Not that it isn’t here, but you’ll be able to step out of its way. Give evil nothing to oppose, and it will disappear by itself.[60]

If a nation is centered in this way, if it nourishes its own people and doesn’t meddle in the affairs of others, it will be a light to all nations of the world.[61]”

This treatise, excerpted from the Tao Te Ching, was written 2500 years ago. Words in italics are various translations for “the Tao.” In the illustration above, squares labeled A and B are actually the same shade of gray. The shadow causes your eyes to deceive you. This illusion wasn’t well known in Lao Tse’s day, but it seems to have a certain Zen to it.

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It’s been a stressful couple of weeks at GlobalGiving.  The success of last year’s launch of biodegradable gift cards inspired us to expand and improve our offering this holiday season.  Part of the improvement was to outsource the fulfillment of the cards.  Believe me, if you had been in our office around December 12th 2007, and seen the late night card-fulfilling process, you would get what I’m talking about. So we did a very thorough RFP and selected what we thought was a cutting edge vendor.  But things have not gone all that smoothly.  We launched the new “platform” a month later than we had hoped.  (Let me just say for the record our lead developer, Kevin, was on schedule).

After an 11th hour trip to the midwest for a “Come to Yahweh” meeting, we launched the new designs & fulfillment process just before midnight Friday November 21st.  We saw orders flowing through the system within hours.  Sounds great, right?  Wrong. Due to some issues on the vendor’s side, no  cards shipped for the first 12 days.  It’s a long story, but the bottom line is that many GlobalGiving customers have waited WAY TOO LONG to get their cards.  We’ve been upset, nervous and doing whatever we can to get things “unstuck.”  And we think we now have.  But the folks who ordered cards between November 21st and December 1st had an experience sort of like going to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

So yesterday we decided to actively communicate with those buyers.  We sent them an email that, among other things, said, “we understand that you expected to receive your order in a timely manner, we apologize,” we told them when to expect the cards, and we sent them a free $10 gift card.  We expected a bunch of understandably frustrated or angry replies.  We braced ourselves.  We held our breath. But we’ve received exactly none.  Instead, we’ve received these:

• Thank you for the update! I appreciate the $10 gc toward a donation of my choice, which I just redeemed.  I’ll look for the cards in the next couple of days.
• I have no problem with the delay.  Obstacles are to be expected.
• Thank you for notifying me about this problem and for your kind offer of the $10 gift card as a compensation for the inconvenience. I was happy to donate it in honor of my daughter.  Blessings to you for creating this wonderful website and service!
• Thank you for the notification.  I do not need the cards before the 8th.  Save any expenses you can!
• Glad I started early with this, so it is not a problem.  Thanks for the $10; it will be put to good use.
• I’m in no rush for the giftcards, if you want to send them slow, that’s fine with me.
• you guys rock!!!

We are still learning and growing but we have very high expectations for ourselves.  These responses let more steam out of the pressure cooker than all the yelling in the world.  Wow do we feel lucky to have the kind of community that responds this way.

As a postscript, today I came across Jeff Brooks” post over at Donor Power Blog: Treat Your Donors To Some Unexpected Kindness, in which he lists 10 Treats Customers Love from the Return Customers blog.  The ones that caught my eye were about showing your customers empathy and explaining the details.  Our marketing team didn’t read his blog before sending out the emails, it just what they thought was the right thing to do.  And our customers seem to have validated that.

Now, where are my damn cards?

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