Blogocentric Formulations

Positive Thing #3

POSITIVE THING #3

Crowdfunding has become a popular means of raising revenue for a variety of causes in recent years, and there are no shortage of sites to help you do it. The most famous is probably Kickstarter for creative projects, but there's also Indiegogo for just about any kind of project, GoFundMe for non-incentive based fundraising, Seed & Spark specifically for film and television, DonorsChoose for education, AngelList for start-ups, Patreon for ongoing sponsorships... and those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Although I've used and donated to quite a few of these over the years, my favorite crowdfunding site above all others is:

Kiva  

If you're not familiar with it, Kiva.org is an entrepreneurship platform for developing countries. Business-and-betterment-minded individuals in those developing countries apply for loans as small as $25 to get them on their feet financially, and those loans are repaid to the investors at which point those investors can roll it over into another loan or cash out.

I really love the fact that these projects are all designed to financially help someone get on their feet in their community. It's not about big profit motives or significant ROI or helping an artist achieve his or her creative vision; it's about helping a struggling store owner in India restock his shop so he can continue to sell goods to the community. It's about giving a farmer in Madagascar the money she needs to purchase chickens and goats so she can support herself selling eggs and dairy. It's about helping a family in Guatemala buy the raw materials needed in order to produce large quantities of hand-sewn goods to sell and support themselves and their relatives. It's about providing tuition for a single mom in Afghanistan so she can take night classes, graduate, and get a job that will better support her children.

While I love funding creative projects and good for-profit business ideas and classroom projects as much as anyone else, there's something immensely satisfying about helping entrepreneurially-minded people around the world make their developing country a little more developed. And it's pretty amazing that you can invest as little as $25 and just keep rolling it over from one campaign to the next as you get repaid.

Not a bad way to help make the world a better place!