The Top Three Reasons That Global Entrepreneurship Week Matters

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 16, 2009 @ 08:48AM PT

This week marks the second annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, a worldwide extravaganza to help celebrate and encourage entrepreneurship among young people. Sponsored by Make Your Mark and the Kauffman Foundation, the week is an agglomeration of events from around the globe, with lead programs focused on mentorship, speed networking, and fundraising. I'm a huge supporter, for three big reasons.

1. The Opportunity Gap. When you travel to other parts of the world, its clear that talent is distributed pretty evenly. People are smart, ambitious, and creative in cities, villages, and everything in between. At the same time, the opportunities to use those talents just don't exist for many. I think this is one of the most important injustices for us to recognize and redress to build a healthier, more equitable 21st century. GEW's focus on global entrepreneurship is a great way to highlight that brilliant ideas and great organizations can come from anywhere.

2. Sense of Common Purpose. I think that entrepreneurs often feel a tension between the desire for creative freedom and the desire to be a part of something larger than themselves and their companies. Worldwide events like GEW have the potential to speak to that second desire, and in the process pull people out of themselves, even if just for a minute to discover new partners and new inspiration.

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Weekend Entrepreneur Links: India, Sustainability, Net Impact

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 15, 2009 @ 07:57PM PT

Some good reads have popped up over the last few days, including some new opportunities for entrepreneurs looking for material and intellectual support for their projects:

Unreasonable Institute Applications are OPEN: The much anticipated Unreasonable Institute application is finally live and online for the next month.

The Funded Founder Institute: While Early Decision applications close tonight, the Funded Founder Institute is an interesting spin on the incubator model that involves a bit of mutual investment.

GWU's exercise in ground-floor entrepreneurship: An entrepreneurship contest and program at George Washington University gets some love from the Washington Post.

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BHS: Buy (Better World) Books, Give the Gift of Reading

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Big Holiday Switch

Published November 14, 2009 @ 10:54AM PT

[ed. note: This post is a part of the Big Holiday Switch, a series of posts about how you can use your consumer dollars to support a change this holiday season. Check out the kick-off post here.]

(Pledge to switch to Better World Books for Holiday book purchases now!)

Giving books is at once simple and thoughtful. While books surround us, the time that we allot to reading them has been pressured by other forms of media consumption. Deciding to give someone a book is a simple act of sharing and a simple act of teaching. What if this holiday season, all of the books you gave could also be contributing towards a more literate, educated world?

That's the promise that Better World Books offers. Originally concocted in a dorm room, Better World Books started when a group of Notre Dame students couldn't sell back their textbooks. They thought it was crazy that all of that knowledge (and all of those pages of dead trees) were going to go to waste, so they used internet sites like half.com to resell them to people who weren't beholden to textbook manufacturer updates.

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Inspiration and Tools for Nonprofit Social Media

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 13, 2009 @ 02:04PM PT

Web2.0 online magazine Mashable is currently currating its third annual Open Web Awards, a series of honors for the brands, companies and nonprofits that are making the most effective use of social media and the companies that are creating the best tools and platforms to help them. Hidden within the 50 categories and 500 nominees are some gems for nonprofits.

The top ten nominees for nonprofit use of social media are great examples of how to get creative and use social media like Facebook and Twitter to augment and accelerate a nonprofit brand, engage donors, or something else entirely:

- Spirit Jump
- Alex’s Lemonade
- A Billion for A Billion
- Frougal Dougal
- Lupus Foundation of America
- PETA
- Voices of Survivors
- Sports Grants Foundation
- Space Tweep Society
- Thank A Soldier

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Foursquare Experiments With Charity-Based Game Mechanics

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Technology

Published November 13, 2009 @ 10:18AM PT

Foursquare is an iPhone application that allows people to "check in" and let their friends know where they are physically. At its heart, it's a tool for deepening relationships by allowing people to bump into one another with more frequency. Yesterday, TechCrunch wrote about how the company is exploring using charitable partnerships to deepen the user experience.

Unlike tools like Google's Latitude, Foursquare does not tap into GPS to automatically locate a person. Instead, it uses game mechanics to incentivize people to manually check in wherever they happen to be. You get points for checking in and adding new locations to their map, and you get badges like "Gym Rat" for checking in multiple times in specific locations or types of locations.

I've found myself strangely addicted to it, despite the fact that I only have four or five other friends who use it, which is validation - either of the smarts of their game mechanics or my generally pathetic addiction to new web tools.

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My Last Word on the Kiva Controversy

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Dissent

Published November 12, 2009 @ 12:59PM PT

The controversy around Kiva's marketing reached a new level earlier this week when an article appeared in the New York Times titled "Confusion Over Where Money Lent on Kiva Goes." For those who had been following the story, there was nothing particularly new. But because it was in the New York Times, it's gotten a whole lot more traction. Personally, I think it's time we moved on. To that end, here's my last word on it.

1. (Most Important) Do the people on Kiva actually get the money? The answer is yes, and this is why despite all the ruckus and important questions about transparency, I think Kiva should come out of this with our support. The difference between perception and reality is about the flow of capital. The way it actually works is that Microfinance Institutions make loans to people before their pictures go up on the site. The money donated goes to those MFIs to support the loans they make. Kiva borrowers DO get the money they're promised; where you, as a loaner, come into the equation, is just a little bit different than some thought. For my part, I think that their actual process is the correct one for maximizing efficiency, for the reasons CEO Matt Flannery articulates here.

2. Do I think that Kiva messed up? I sure do. This one has been a bit difficult for me to blog about because while Kiva is one of my favorite nonprofits in the world, I think this was a tremendous goof. There is no more important capital in today's world than trust. And there is nothing more important for a site like Kiva than to create a compelling giving experience. By fudging the perception, or at least not working too hard to change people's misperceptions that ended up being advantageous (depending on how you look at it), Kiva has lost the trust of some of its lenders, perhaps irrevocably.

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Announcing the Charter for Compassion

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 12, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT

Some version of the Golden Rule is at the core of almost all belief systems. The idea is simple - that one should do to others as they would have done to them, that one should strive to understand the experience of another as their own. The Golden Rule is an affirmation of empathy.

The Charter for Compassion is a new collaboration from faith and belief leaders from across disciplines to affirm the centrality of empathy and compassion for others at the core of the human experience. The charter was initiated as part of a 2008 "TED Wish" by Karen Armstrong. TED Wishes are $100,000 grants given to a few exceptional people each year.

Since then, TED, in collaboration with a wide array of partner groups, has put together the Charter and more than 70 launch events to put it in the public spotlight. Entrepreneurial faith groups like the Interfaith Youth Core are part of the network helping disseminate the project.

To learn more about the Charter and the partner organizations, visit Charterforcompassion.org