CauseWired Quote Of The Day

My friend Tom Watson has written a book on "peer to peer philanthropy" called CauseWired. It’s not yet out but you can pre-order it at that link.

Tom gave me a preview of it and I am going to blog some quotes from it that relate to Donors Choose throughout the month of October as a cool way to remind readers of the Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge.

Here’s the first one:

"I thought there must be a helluva lot of people who want to improve their public schools but figure if they write a hundred-dollar check to the school system, it just goes into an institutional black hole. So why not let them choose the project, see where their money was going, and hear back from the classroom….that was the genesis." Charles Best, Founder of Donor’s Choose

And if you are so inclined and haven’t done so already, please pick a project of your own to "write a hundred dollar check" to.

NOTE: We’ve fully funded nine out of the initial eleven projects on the AVC giving page. Thanks! I’ve added five new projects we can fund and they’ll appear on the giving page shortly. Again, if there are projects you like the sound of, please alert me to them and I’ll add them to the AVC giving page.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. Emil Sotirov

    Fred… I’ll read Tom’s book about P2P philanthropy with great interest because this is what we (my team) have been working on since 2004 with Aidpage and now with JuiceTorrent.DonorsChoose.org is a wonderful thing but it is still somewhat more mediated than what we try to achieve. I see it as mid-way to true web enabled P2P helping. DonorsChoose.org has 3 times the staff of Craigslist and depends on multimillion dollar grants and corporate sponsorships – very much like any other traditional nonprofit. The big new thing they do of course is the transparency from donor to beneficiary and back.Anyway… thank you for using your blog for promoting this truly social use of the web. I’d be most happy to hear your opinion on our JuiceTorrent model.

  2. gruvr music map

    This is a really nice idea – I like the GIS and insect map project… I already made an ‘angel’ investment via Kiva.org though – I assume you know about Kiva: http://gruvr.com/news/There's P2P philanthropy but also P2P micro-investing – think about Prosper.com – you can find lots of good credit risks and small businesses to invest in there. Kiva and Prosper.com seem like safer places to keep cash than banks right now, although the model is investment and not pure philanthropy – it helps people become self-reliant.once my Kiva investment is paid back, I’ll come back and look at putting it into one of these projects.