Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [61]
The Omidyar Network has funded dozens of other social entrepreneurs across a wide range of activities, including Cell Bazaar, which connects buyers and sellers through a mobile phone–based marketplace; CircleLending, which manages loans between relatives, friends, and other private parties; Common Sense Media, which works to improve the impact of media and entertainment on kids and families; KaBOOM!, a partner in my foundation’s efforts against childhood obesity, which helps communities to design, build, and maintain their own playgrounds; and Modest Needs, which helps keep struggling families from falling into poverty by allowing them to cover small but unexpected expenses by pooling what they can afford to share.
Another Omidyar Network recipient, GlobalGiving, also helps to fund social entrepreneurs. Launched in 2002 by two former World Bank executives, Global Giving’s Web site, GlobalGiving.com, allows donors at all levels to look through a large list of projects, organized by geography or subject matter. Once a donor locates a project, he or she can contribute any amount, knowing that the donation is tax deductible under U.S. law, that it will reach the project within a month, and that all donors receive regular progress reports on the projects they support.
The Web site offers more than four hundred projects in more than sixty countries. Since 2001, about 750 projects have received over $5 million from more than two thousand donors.
Other foundations set up to fund social entrepreneurs include Echoing Green and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Echoing Green, similar to the Ashoka model, was founded in 1987 by American investor Ed Cohen and has provided seed capital to more than 400 social entrepreneurs. The Schwab Foundation was started by Klaus Schwab (who also founded the World Economic Forum) and his wife, Hilde. It has supported more than one hundred entrepreneurs and, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, gives them the opportunity to discuss their work with and garner support from business and foundation executives, prominent government leaders, and heads of multinational agencies.
Long-established foundations are also now more inclined to fund innovation, especially in its early stages. In 2000, the Ford and Annie E. Casey foundations helped launch One Economy, which is committed to bringing broadband into the homes of low-income people and to providing easy-to-access information on education, health, employment, and available public benefits through its multilingual portal, the Beehive (thebeehive.org). There is also a program to help people buy computers. More than 200,000 people have obtained broadband at home thanks to One Economy, and more than 9.5 million people have used the Beehive, nearly two million of them in Spanish.
One Economy began in Washington, D.C., when Rey Ramsey, now its CEO, and three other young people imagined a world with no digital divide, one in which all people could share the benefits of information technology. Now One Economy has programs in a dozen U.S. cities and in South Africa, Mozambique, Jordan, and Egypt. In the United States, it is also working to change housing policies so that broadband is financed as part of the construction of all government-subsidized housing, with remaining costs financed through operating budgets, like security or landscaping. So far One Economy has helped to win policy changes in forty-two states and several cities and counties.
People have used the Beehive to learn about and file for the earned income tax credit; to produce business plans or find jobs; to learn how to create a family budget or how to write a check; to learn how to earn their GED or to access Medicaid benefits; and to get information on health problems, from diabetes to alcoholism. More than forty