“People say we are overstating the importance of technology in giving. I say, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” British charity tech guru Steve Bridger was in bullish form this Thursday morning, September 29th, at the Gulbenkian Foundation in London’s trendy Hoxton Square, just around the corner from the British tech hub known as ‘silicon roundabout’. […]
Last year we made a set of predictions for 2010. Some were satisfyingly prescient – the surge in mega-giving we predicted for 2010 became a reality through the Buffett-Gates Giving Pledge (even if we were off the mark in betting on Steve Jobs rather than Larry Ellison to be the Gates business rival who would step up to major philanthropy). […]
“[T]he call to social action needs to speak to individuals’ motivations and account for the obstacles to giving; to fit with people’s lifestyles and interests.” That this is the big idea in the British Government’s new Green Paper on Giving that was launched in London on Wednesday, shows the influence of so-called behavioural economists like Richard Thaler […]
2010 has been a good year for books touching on philanthrocapitalism. In no particular order, here is our final batch of favourites (not including our own “The Road From Ruin“). We will highlight our worst books of the year and remind you of some must-read classics in later posts. “Waiting for ‘Superman’,” by Karl Weber […]
“Watch out Vittana”, tweeted Stephanie Strom (@ssstrom), the philanthropy writer at the New York Times, in response to Matthew’s tweet that Kiva, the online microfinance powerhouse, may be about to enter the student lending marketplace. Matthew reported Kiva’s likely expansion in an article in The Economist that argues that lending to finance students in poor […]
London is currently full of stranded social entrepreneurs, prevented by volcanic ash from returning home from this week’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford. This has prompted all sorts of initiatives to make their enforced ‘volcation’ in London more bearable. The Global Impact Investing Network, for instance, is holding its ‘First Annual GIIN Volcanic Ash Refugees […]
If government isn’t the answer to all society’s ills, how can citizens take control and find real solutions to problems as diverse as loneliness and youth crime? Well, the Big Society Network that launched in London on Thursday thinks it has the answer – half public awareness campaign, half social networking site, half thinktank, half old-fashioned mutual society, […]
“The ‘oh, woe is me’ thing, we’ve just got to get over that. The world has changed. It’s happened.” So said Beth Frerking at a social entrepreneurship conference organised by students at Harvard Business School on February 27th-28th. The “it” in question is the shock to the news media caused by the combination of economic […]
“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. […]
2009 showed that the philanthrocapitalism revolution is here to stay, as mega-giving by the likes of Bill Gates and the mass philanthrocapitalism of organisations like kiva.org and donorschoose surged ahead despite the economic downturn. So what does 2010 hold in store? Gazing into our crystal ball, we see philanthrocapitalism continuing to surge ahead as givers […]