In the heart of Vancouver's poorest neighborhood, a thriving business is helping homeless and low-income people earn money by cleaning up the environment.

United We Can pays about 700 people a day deposits on recyclable containers they've collected, distributing more than $2 million a year to "binners" who eke out a living rummaging through garbage. I profiled the non-profit and its founder Ken Lyotier in this story today.

KRISTI HEIM

United We Can safety trainer James Hance, who grew up in Vancouver's tough Downtown Eastside, says he'd rather stay and help the community than work elsewhere. He stands in front of a T-shirt with a corner chewed off by rats in the organization's aging warehouse.

In addition, the non-profit employs 150 part-time and full-time workers to pick up from local businesses, sort bottles and cans in its warehouse, and haul them to a recycling center. United We Can earns a handling fee from beverage producers, who are required by law to ensure that their containers are refilled or recycled. The handling fee supports United We Can's operations, making it a sustainable business.

United We Can will be able to expand its work during the Olympics, hiring 60 additional people to help collect containers around downtown and at local hotels and restaurants.

KRISTI HEIM/SEATTLE TIMES

People line up with carts full of recyclables outside United We Can's bottle depot along East Hastings Street. The average "binner" earns about $10 a day.

Lyotier, who battled homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction himself, said he has never turned away anyone who wanted to work.

"Many of the people working at United We Can came from the streets," he said.

"I personally believe that when people who have had obstacles discover they do have value," Lyotier said, "they sometimes make the choice to move on to a more normal model of what success means."

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is notorious for a concentration of social problems such as open drug dealing, homelessness, mental illness and prostitution. Blocks away from Olympics venues, the neighborhood will face a global spotlight next month as the focus of protests by activists who are frustrated by a lack of progress on social issues. And yet people at the busy bottle depot see a resilient community underneath.

"You hear a lot of bad stuff but I see so many good things," said United We Can safety trainer James Hance. "Everyone says all you find is misery here, but I find more kindness here than lots of other areas."

It was clear the earthquake wrought devastation on a massive scale. Time saved meant lives saved. Two wireless companies in Bellevue went straight to work, one to repair its mobile network in Haiti and the other to channel funds to relief workers using text messaging.

In a country where traditional landline service is almost non-existent, more than a million Haitians rely on the mobile service Voilà for communications. That service is provided by Bellevue-based Trilogy International Partners, which received an award this year from the U.S. State Department for its decade of work in the impoverished country.

THONY BELIZAIRE/APF/GETTY IMAGES

Haitians carry injured in Port-au-Prince, as planeloads of rescuers and relief supplies headed there in a massive relief operation.

Trilogy said members of its crisis task force were one of the first aircraft to land this morning at the Port-au-Prince airport to assist on-the-ground efforts.The earthquake wiped out much of the infrastructure in the most densely populated part of the country. Its local team could travel only by foot because roads were so heavily damaged.

Senior management of Trilogy, its Haitian wireless operation (Voilà) and its Dominican Republic operation (Trilogy Dominicana/Viva) began a disaster recovery plan and formed a special task force to secure the safety of its 500 local employees and assess damages, the company said in a post today on its Web site. Within hours the team determined its buildings were intact and its staff located.

"Voilà's network continued to operate for several hours through the aftershocks before we were forced to shut down the switch to maintain its integrity until our generators and cooling systems were back online," the company said in its post. "We have restarted our generators at the main switch and are in the process of bringing our network back up. Once this has occurred, we will be focused on managing traffic and adding capacity as rapidly as possible to aid the humanitarian efforts in Haiti."

TRACIE MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Trilogy Chairman John Stanton was given a global citizenship award from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for his company's work in Haiti, including a micro-enterprise that helps local entrepreneurs earn money and a partnership with musician Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti foundation to support education.

In Bellevue, Jim Manis at the Mobile Giving Foundation quickly worked to roll out text message- based fundraising efforts. Manis founded the non-profit to help other non-profit organizations receive donations through text messaging campaigns. I profiled the foundation here.

People can text a keyword to a designated short code and make a donation of $5 or $10 to any of several organizations working to help Haiti. Every penny of the donation goes to the charity, and the amount appears later as a charge on the donor's mobile phone bill.

The Mobile Giving Foundation said it has already raised about $375,000 today, through the following campaigns:

• Text the word "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to the Yele Foundation, the leading contributor to rebuilding Haiti founded by Wyclef Jean.


• Text the word "Haiti" to 25383 to donate $5 to the International Rescue Committee


• Text the word "Haiti" to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross.


• Text the word "Haiti" to 45678 (In Canada Only) to assist the Salvation Army in Canada.



Amazon.com established a box on its homepage today where customers can contribute to Mercy Corps' relief efforts.

Other groups engaged in ongoing relief efforts in Haiti include:

Partners In Health, Boston, www.pih.org
Mercy Corps, Portland, 800-852-2100 or www.mercycorps.org
Medical Teams International, Portland, 800-959-4325 or www.nwmedicalteams.org
American Red Cross, 800-733-2767 or www.redcross.org
World Concern, Seattle, 800-755-5022 or www.worldconcern.org
World Vision, Federal Way, 888-511-6548 or www.worldvision.org

Earlier this week I wrote about Paul Allen's involvement in a new PBS series "This Emotional Life," which wrapped up last night (but can still be watched on the Web site).

It takes a fascinating look at the latest research into human emotion, combined with real-life stories of people coping with emotional issues. Based on comments I've received and a look at some of the conversations on Facebook, the topic resonated deeply with a public searching for more meaning in life.

Some suggested it should be a weekly show. At this point there are no plans to re-broadcast the series, but it is available on iTunes and here on the PBS Web site.

Allen said he intended the TV series to be just the starting point of the project. Now a two-year outreach program begins, both online and in communities around the country.

The PBS Web site can be searched by topic or location to find resources such as Meetup groups and other organizations, and anyone can register and contribute new resources to the database.

COURTESY OF THIS EMOTIONAL LIFE

Dr. Michael Maddaus talked about his path from a troubled youth with alcoholic parents, time in jail and little education, to a successful surgeon with a happy family, thanks to a single mentor.

In an unusual effort for a film company, Vulcan Productions is spearheading the project, developing kits to address early attachment for parents, and emotional challenges for members of the military and their families. Both will combine online resources with booklets to be distributed through partner organizations such as Blue Star Families and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

"Early Moments Matter" is aimed at high birthrate hospitals, offices and clinics, targeting expecting and new parents, while "The Family Guide to Military Deployment" will go to government organizations and branches of the armed forces.

Two local researchers were involved in the series, Dr. John Gottman, a psychologist who specializes in conflict resolution and is founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, and Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, a psychology professor at the University of Washington who specializes in infant development and connection to parents.

Meltzoff and his team at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences won a $4 million grant from the Life Sciences Discovery Fund. Later this year they plan to set up the first machine that can measure emotional development in babies using a new technology called magnetoecephalography (MEG).

Washington state Rep. Ruth Kagi, who chairs the House Early Learning & Children's Services Committee, said she is studying implications of the science on policy.

If, as Meltzoff's research shows, humans develop the emotional circuitry for their entire lifetimes in the first three years, making the most of that time would seem a critical task not only for parents but for all of society.

More for charity and less for the landfill, says TisBest founder Erik Marks. I talked with him about the trend of charity gift cards, which his non-profit issues, and recent criticisms from consumer advocates. Marks, a member of Social Venture Partners, started TisBest Philanthropy in 2007.

Even as TisBest has grown, Marks has kept his day job as general counsel at EDG Commercial Real Estate in Seattle and operates TisBest with three employees. Previously he worked at law firms Cairncross & Hempelmann and at Perkins Coie. He studied philosophy as an undergrad and has a law degree from Harvard.

Q: How are you different from other charity card issuers?
A: The array of charity gift card issuers has become broader with eight or nine now, but the largest are TisBest, Charity Gift Certificates, JustGive, and the Good Card.
Only TisBest and Charity Gift Certificates are single-purpose portals -- the only thing you see are gift cards. I like to believe the single-purpose approach is better. When the recipient gets a card, the Web site speaks only to the gift in hand, not six other things.
We've got the best Web site for a lot of reasons, and the uploadable image feature is probably the feature people get most excited about. That customization makes our cards particularly valuable for businesses.

Q: You have less than 300 charities to choose from, not thousands or a million -- why?
A: One advantage is browsing. When someone gets a gift card, most people have a few charities in mind but not one they're dead set on. When you get to the charities tab, it's broken down in categories.
We've consciously chosen 125 organizations that are major recognized brand names. Under homelessness for example, you will find recognizable names like Habitat for Humanity. But people also see smaller organizations they don't recognize, then they browse around and they learn. People talk about choosing a charity as a challenge and a challenge they like.
Another advantage is accessibility. If you put YMCA into the Network for Good search box, it will turn up about 200 organizations. At TisBest you turn up just one.

Q: How do you find organizations to list?
A: We spent some time when we started out in 2007 building that list, doing research, basically hard work. Now we source organizations through user recommendations. We receive emails four or five times a day nominating new organizations. We go over those and pick 20 new organizations a year. We will remove 20 that aren't receiving donations.

TISBEST PHILANTHROPY

TisBest is appealing to businesses by making customized gift cards.

Q: What is the $1.95 transaction fee for?
A: It covers our overhead for operating the organization and Web site.
We are a social enterprise model. We offer a valuable and self-sustaining social service on a nonprofit basis.
The idea is we offer charity gift cards in a format that isn't profitable but that does produce enough revenue that our organization can operate and grow. We ask people on receipts to request matching donations from their companies, and that too helps cover our overhead.

Q: Why are gift cards any better than direct donations?
A: It's the difference between charitable giving and charitable gifting. In giving, I take my own money and give it to a cause I support. I love the beach, I love to surf, so Surfrider Foundation might be something I support with my money. But let's say I'm buying you a holiday gift. That might not be your first choice for a charity. There are a lot of different ideas about what the right thing is to do to create change in the world.

We give each other gifts to build relationships. It's a great way to connect human to human. It's the connection that matters, not the thing... When a person who receives the card spends it, the person who gave it learns the charity that was chosen. That's a great opportunity to build a relationship.

Q: How much have you raised for charity?
A: Over $1 million. This is our third holiday season.

Q: How can charity gift card issuers avoid the problems of retail gift cards?
A: One thing to keep in mind is that I really don't think there are many problems with gift cards in the marketplace... it's just a fringe. Gift cards came out around the year 2000. Everyone was figuring out how they worked. Now almost all states regulate gift cards, including Washington.

(Marks also cited the book Scroogenomics, which argues that holiday presents are inefficient and unsatisfying, but gift cards, especially to charity, are not).

Q: Why transfer funds quarterly -- are you holding money to earn interest?
A: That's a red herring. We had to make a decision. Every transfer has a cost. If we made transfers on weekly or monthly basis it would be unreasonably expensive. At the current interest rates of maybe about 1 percent a year. if you hold for a calendar quarter instead of a week, you're not getting a lot of extra interest, and that tiny amount is earned by a philanthropy trying to do good in the world.

Q: Why did you start TisBest?
A: I'm an attorney and I still practice part time -- that's how I pay the bills. I made a conscious decision to change. I wanted to work in something that made the world better, and to some degree I was bored. Partly it was a response to personal frustration. I was scratching my head around the holidays. I needed to give gifts and I didn't know what to get. I don't want to buy people stuff they don't want. I think the world would be better if people focused on how to make it better rather than how to get more stuff.
Today in running TisBest I get to see what people write about giving and receiving charity gift cards, and see the true joy that comes there; and then when I leave work and walk around and see stores with heaping baskets of stuff they're trying to sell, it is a disconnect. The stuff just doesn't create joy in the same way as sharing with others.

Q: How are commercial products like gift cards changing philanthropy?
A: It's the democratization of philanthropy. It's making philanthropy more fun and more accessible for more people. It captures additional dollars from consumers. If you look at how a normal consumer lives, they have a certain income and they allocate it out. One of those wallets is gifts. We're taking dollars out of the gifts wallet and turning them into charity dollars. We're not diverting any funds from charity. Charities have always focused on the big donors, but no one becomes a big donor without becoming a little one first. We are an entry point for accessing those little ones.

Charity gift cards are springing up as a new way to give a gift and let the recipient pass it on to the non-profit of his or her choice.

The cards have been growing in popularity as people combine holiday shopping and philanthropy on tight budgets. But the non-profit Consumer Reports warned last month that charity cards are saddled with some of the same issues as gift cards in general -- including added fees and expiration dates.

TONY AVELAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Spending on regular gift cards is expected to drop this year, according to the National Retail Federation. But charity gift cards are becoming a popular tool for some non-profits.

The card issuer generally charges about $5 to purchase the card and may charge another 3 percent when the recipient redeems the card to make a donation, according to the report. The tax deduction goes to the purchaser, not the recipient. And card issuers sometimes take up to four months to forward the donation.

Three of the top charity gift card producers took issue with the report and complained that "Consumer Reports is driving money away from charities at a time they need it most." The cards serve a useful purpose by redirecting "money that was being spent on unneeded and unwanted stuff" to charity.

Seattle's Paul Shoemaker, founder of Social Venture Partners, also weighed in with support for the charity cards.

"In our experience, charity gift cards introduce many potential donors to charitable organizations that they otherwise would not connect with," he said. "That is a good thing at a time when so many non-profit organizations are struggling to survive."

CharityChoice, JustGive and TisBest, which are all non-profits themselves, say they have repeat users who have been happy with the experience and terms. They point out that donors would pay the same 3 percent processing fee for any online donation.

Seattle-based TisBest was created to provide "non-material options available in a world of many, many material choices," said Executive Director Jon Siegel.

The American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog, recommended people give to charities directly. "Why hand over a chunk of your contribution to a third party web site when you can give directly through a charity's own site?" it asks.

The institute also frowns on the practice of earning interest on donations by delaying their transmission to the charity. "If the site allows you to give to hundreds of thousands of charities, your $25 donation may sit in its bank account for awhile," it said.

Consumer Reports advised people to consider giving directly to the charitable group in someone's name and cut out the middleman.

But obviously that takes away the option of letting the recipient choose where to give, which may be worth a few extra dollars. Either way, the blending of commercial tools and charitable goals seems like an unstoppable trend, and one that will benefit from good watchdogs. If done right, it has the potential to get many more people involved in giving than traditional philanthropy.

Before giving any card, it's a good idea to check out its terms and conditions, which are usually listed on its Web site under FAQs.

Retail gift card sales are expected to decline this year as people hunt for bargains and try to steer clear of expiration dates, added fees, lost cards or stores that may go out of business, according to a recent survey. Still gift cards will account for almost $25 billion this year, according to the National Retail Federation. That's a significant market for charities to try to tap.

New ways of blending charity causes with online behavior continue to grow -- hastened by the need to find creative ways to raise funds in a down economy.

The latest is GlobalMojo, a Web browser that channels money to nonprofits when its users search, shop or book travel.

It has agreements with Yahoo, with online retailers and with travel companies, which give ad revenue to GlobalMojo for directing users to their sites. Users generate money even if they just browse. The company also customizes its browsers for individual nonprofits.

GoodSearch is another Yahoo-powered search engine that donates half of its revenue to charities and schools designated by its users.

This month GlobalMojo will be donating 100 percent of its revenue to non-profits and schools chosen by its users. After that it will give half of the revenues to charity and use the other half for its operating costs.

The company is based in San Francisco but with an equal number of staff in its Seattle office, where one of its investors and advisers is McCaw Cellular veteran Dan Kranzler.

GlobalMojo Creative Director Chris Wilson says the browser helps nonprofits address two of their most pressing needs: a new, ongoing revenue stream to help with fund raising and a way to stay in front of their constituents on a daily basis. The site has 1.5 million nonprofits and schools in its database, and 100 non-profits and schools are actively using the tool.

Right now users are generating between $10 and $15 a year for the non-profits they support, Wilson said.

Local groups participating include At Work, Northwest Harvest, People for Puget Sound, Seeds of Compassion, Seattle Humane Society and Whatcom Middle School.

The historic Whatcom Middle School was gutted last month by a three-alarm fire. Two of its students happened to be the nieces of GlobalMojo's Vice President Emily Hine. She created a special school-themed Internet browser to help raise funds.

I've written about other tech tools such as mobile applications that facilitate donations by SMS, granting money to nonprofits chosen by online voting and other hybrids. I've also heard about companies that have people fill out marketing surveys and donate a portion to charity.

Maybe this is all just part of our multitasking-obsessed world.

"Many people find it difficult to help others in need while dealing with constraints in their own lives," says GlobalMojo's material.

But an interesting debate is also going on here -- whether such services make it too easy, giving us the illusion we're doing community service when in fact we have no real connection to the cause and we're simply buying more stuff or getting lost in our gadgets.

That was the charge leveled against "micro-volunteering" company The Extraordinaries, which has an iPhone app to let people volunteer a few minutes during the day to tag photos or something similar.

"We consider ourselves to be philanthropic," says Wilson. "We are not in this to make a pile of money."

With the Internet, something that has become such a fundamental part of daily life, trying to put it to better use makes sense, he said.

"Everything you do is online."

If anyone has been trying these tools and has thoughts about their usefulness, I'd be interested to hear your opinions.

The Grameen Foundation today named David Edelstein as the new director of its Seattle-based Grameen Technology Center.

Edelstein had been the director of information and communication technology innovation at the center, and like his predecessor, also has experience at Microsoft.

The Grameen Foundation and Microsoft are getting ready to announce a new initiative this week to use technology in support of financial services for the poor.

GRAMEEN FOUNDATION

The man above is a Village Phone operator in rural Uganda. At 15 to 20 cents per minute, mobile phone calls are expensive, but they save villagers from walking miles or taking a long bus ride to the nearest public phone.

The two are planning a series of education and mentoring forums and other activities to help microfinance institutions strengthen their technology management capabilities. It's part of an effort by Grameen to help microfinance institutions understand how technology can enhance their work.

One of the signature products of Grameen is the Village Phone, which local entrepreneurs rent to villagers for pennies a call.

Grameen also has a partnership with Google in Africa for its AppLab, using mobile phones to help people in poor communities without Internet access get information about farming, health and trading by SMS.

Mobile phones, which are becoming commonplace in many developing countries, have proven to have a number of promising applications, including mobile banking and medical diagnostics. The M-PESA system in Kenya, developed to help borrowers receive and repay money for micro loans, now has more than 6 million subscribers.

Edelstein's experience includes helping build AppLab and focusing on affordable technology products and business strategies for people in developing countries at Microsoft and at McKinsey & Co.

He replaces Peter Bladin, founding director of the Technology Center who is now the foundation's executive vice president for programs and regions.

Seattle's global health experts are busy in laboratories and in the field, working on problems such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. So busy, in fact, that they don't always know about work being done down the street.

Washington's health expertise is spreading around the globe.

A new study being unveiled today attempts to bridge the information gap. It shows the breadth and depth of the state's role in global health, mapping out nearly 500 projects of global health organizations in Washington in 92 countries with 587 unique partners.

The two maps are based on data from nine local organizations and will be expanded in the future to include others.

This map shows where local organizations currently have projects.

This map shows where Seattle organizations have offices and labs.

Produced by the Washington Global Health Alliance, the maps are designed to help local organizations discover potential collaborations and shared facilities, and showcase global health as a powerful and emerging sector in the region.

"Everybody recognizes that to address these issues, the more information the better and the fewer barriers the better," said Lisa Cohen, founding director of the alliance.

Alliance members include Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Institute for Systems Biology, PATH, Public Health - Seattle & King County, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Seattle Children's Hospital Global Alliance for the Prevention of Prematurity and Stillbirth, the University of Washington, Washington State University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is not included in the tally because the study focuses on organizations doing work in the field, not those funding them.

Many of the founding members of the alliance have doubled in size over the past five to seven years. Global health organizations expanding in South Lake Union are redefining the area beyond the original life-sciences cluster.

The alliance can help state businesses and non-profits get connected to opportunities in places where global health projects have paved the way, such as China and India, Cohen said.

Through the alliance, local health authorities hope to apply methods used in global health projects to improve health of people here in the Seattle area.

"A lot of people think global health is over there and doesn't have relevance here," Cohen said, but the H1N1 pandemic has made the links clear.

Community health workers, for example, have been vital to programs internationally, bringing medicine and information about prenatal care and disease prevention to people in rural areas. Such a model could work here, especially in South King County, where workers with language and cultural skills could help train diverse populations living below the poverty line who are unfamiliar with the health system, Cohen said.

Social entrepreneurship has caught on in Seattle in a big way. It takes two of the region's strengths -- its entrepreneurial streak and its humanitarian drive -- and forges interesting new hybrids. Think FareStart, VillageReach and many other examples.

KRIS HERBST

Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka and pioneer of social entrepreneurship.

Now the man who helped pioneer that concept and expand its practice is visiting Seattle this week, judging the Microsoft non-profit awards and speaking at an event tonight.

Bill Drayton founded Ashoka, a global network that encourages and funds people to change society for the better. Started almost 30 years ago, Ashoka now has a network of 2,000 fellows in more than 60 countries. Some notable fellows include Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Whales.

Similar to the way a business entrepreneur might create new products or services, social entrepreneurs create new solutions to social problems.

Ashoka has expanded its Youth Venture program to Seattle, and 40 new ventures have been started by students from around Seattle, including Jessica Markowitz.

One new local partnership between Youth Venture and the Jolkona Foundation is aimed at getting young philanthropists interested in supporting the work of other young people.

Jolkona will feature some of Youth Venture's projects in Seattle on its Web site, including a teen publication in Issaquah to encourage journalism skills and newspaper reading habits among youth, and American Youth for Equal Educational Opportunities, a project to provide education supplies to students in the Bellevue School District who are in need of financial aid.

Social entrepreneurs help bridge the gap between philanthropy and business. On that topic, an interesting debate is going on with Intrepid Philanthropist blogger Phil Buchanan.

After the pounding that non-profits have received from some critics in the business world, it's good to see someone pushing back.

Update: And the winners are: Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University; Trish Millines-Dziko of Technology Access Foundation and John Wood of Room to Read.

Microsoft alumni have been a generous bunch. They've started at least 150 non-profits and given millions, if not billions, to causes from global health to education to equal rights.

Now the Microsoft Alumni Foundation is kicking off a new awards program to honor former employees working to improve the world through their philanthropy and socially motivated business.

On Wednesday evening, Bill and Melinda Gates will present the top three award winners as Integral Fellows, who will receive $25,000 each for the nonprofit of their choice. The finalists were chosen by a panel of judges -- former President Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Drayton, Pierre Omidyar, and Tom Tierney.

Of the 66 nominees, here are the six finalists:

Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University, an educational institution in Ghana whose mission is to educate African leaders of exceptional integrity and professional ability.

Peter Bladin of Grameen Foundation, which helps the world's poorest, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty through access to microfinance and technology.

Linda English of Learning for International NGOs (LINGOs), a consortium of over 40 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations providing the latest learning technologies and courses from partners to increase the skill levels of the international nonprofit employees and the impact of their programs.

Tom Ikeda of Densho, The Japanese American Legacy Project, which helps students explore issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria, and the responsibilities of citizenship through the examination of the unjust World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Trish Millines Dziko of Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that is dedicated to preparing students of color for academic and professional success in today's technology-driven world.

John Wood of Room to Read, which partners with local communities in the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children's literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls.

In the current jobless recovery, people are running out of unemployment benefits before they find job openings. Some may look to starting a small business of their own, but who would loan them money without a track record? Certainly not banks.

For such local entrepreneurs, the answer has been non-profits like Community Capital Development. CCD has provided $26 million to more than 1,000 previously "unbankable" local businesses, including Plum Bistro, Bedrock Industries and Utilikilts.

CCD-backed businesses create and sustain hundreds of local jobs, most of which go to people with low-to-moderate incomes. For entrepreneurs with a solid business plan and 10 percent of the capital, CCD provides a fixed-rate loan over five years plus free business counseling and subsidized accounting and marketing services. It charges 9 percent interest on loans.

CHRIS MUNFORD

Bedrock Industries, which turns recycled glass into art, is one of CCD's success stories.

But CCD ultimately relies on banks for capital to lend. In the current economy, that has dried up, and Chief Executive Jim Thomas worries about the fallout on struggling enterprises.

"They can't go to a bank," he told me over lunch recently. "They'll struggle along but they won't be able to grow. They'll go to the credit cards, which are at least 18 percent. they'll end up paying interest only. At interest only, you can never reduce that debt."

Another blow was losing Washington Mutual, which was one of CCD's top lenders. The new owner, JPMorgan Chase, does not lend to CCD. Washington Mutual was closed by the government a year ago in the largest bank failure in U.S. history. Its assets were sold to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion.

Meanwhile, CCD is down to microloans, funded by the Small Business Administration. The trouble is borrowers can get only one, and it's usually not enough to get a business off the ground in the U.S.

The problem is much bigger than CCD. The entire industry of Community Development Financial Institutions, a category of firms known as CDFIs that provide credit, financial services and training to under served markets, has been hit hard by the credit crunch. The segment that serves the least advantaged is suffering from a problem brought on largely by the mistakes and greed of bigger banks and Wall Street, now the beneficiaries of billions in bailout money.

Janet Ozarchuk, vice president and treasurer of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), said her institution received some help recently from Bank of America. But banks in the first two quarters of 2009 didn't lend a single dollar to CDFIs, she said.

"The grant dollars have hung in there, but a good part of funding comes from banks," she said. "That has just been devastated."

"We have one of the strongest balance sheets of any non-profit," Thomas said. "We are not leveraged. But we cannot borrow money because it's not available."

Some efforts have begun to address the problem.

Community development non-profits may be able to raise capital from foundations' Program Related Investing (PRIs). In the current economy, foundations are exploring ways to make more social impact with their assets. PRIs can be used to guarantee loans and bring other investors and banks into the deal, said Ozarchuk.

Last month Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced legislation to extend credit to small businesses by allocating existing TARP funds to community banks.

Banks that get such federal help would be required to generate new credit equal or greater to the amount of capitalization received from the federal government. By the end of 2010 the bank would be required to increase overall business loans outstanding by at least 5 percent over the lowest level reached in 2009.

Untested borrowers are a higher risk. Many banks, whether commercial or community or even credit unions, are interested in making low interest loans for community development non-profits "only because they have some legal obligations to fulfill," says CCD's Chief Operating Officer Hongqing Chen.

The bill has the potential to be effective "if and only if it requires a certain percent of new business loans be made to distressed communities and low to medium income borrowers," she said.

The interesting marriage between online communities and the social sector has produced two more offspring:

One is a project by Global Washington called Blueprint for Action, which asks the public to help set priorities for development by posting their ideas and solutions. Readers can vote on the ideas, and the author with the most votes gets to host a session on that topic at a conference next month in Seattle.

Here's an idea someone submitted to Global Washington called checks and balances:

"We need to have an improved system of communication between people in the rural developing countries and 'bright' planners and analysts working for organizations such as Gates Foundation. Otherwise, we will find again and again that interests are not aligned with increasing the sustainable livelihoods and economic independence of the poor."

JON OSBORNE

Kushal Chakrabarti, co-founder of Vittana, talks with members of the World Affairs Council's Young Professionals International Network in Seattle.

Another example of online media-philanthropy hybrids is a project to solicit audience help in choosing and awarding the best innovators, visionaries and leaders, who are profiled on Huffington Post.

Kushal Chakrabarti, co-founder of Seattle education non-profit Vittana made the Top 10 "Ultimate Game Changers in Philanthropy."

I wrote about Vittana here a few months ago, and the start-up has made some huge strides since then, including bringing student loans to Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Mongolia, and getting its first repayment from students who now have jobs.

In addition, Vittana has received funding from some tech heavyweights, including Mitch Kapor and Mike Murray.

If you like what he's doing, you can vote for him over the next week or so.

The Game Changers awards honor 100 people for using new media to reshape their fields and change the world in politics, entertainment, technology, media, sports, business, style, health, environment and philanthropy.

Another person who made the top 10, the "godfather of social entrepreneurship," Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, will be in Seattle on Nov. 17.

Leadership Tomorrow and CityClub will host a conversation with Drayton, chairman and CEO of Ashoka, moderated by Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners. I won't have to travel far -- the event is being held in the Seattle Times Auditorium, 1120 John St., starting at 5 p.m.

Catherine Ivy lost her husband, Ben, to brain cancer just four months after he was diagnosed.

Now a unique project funded by the couple's foundation is bringing Seattle's technology expertise to bear on the problem to help scientists better understand how to fight it.

The Center for Advanced Brain Tumor Treatment at Swedish Medical Center and the Allen Institute for Brain Science are teaming up to work on the new $4.4 million Ivy Glioblastoma Atlas Project. Initial funding comes from the Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation, based in Palo Alto, Ca.

Glioblastoma multiforme is the most common type of brain tumor, and also one of the most malignant forms of cancer, fast spreading, difficult to remove or treat and almost always fatal. Ben Ivy, a native of Everett, passed away from glioblastoma in 2005, and the cancer claimed the life of U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy in August.

JOHN LOK/SEATTLE TIMES

Dr. Greg Foltz peers into a magnifier during surgery recently to remove a patient's brain tumor at Swedish Medical Center Cherry Hill.

Dr. Greg Foltz, a scientist and surgeon with the Swedish Neuroscience Institute, heads the Ivy Foundation project. Foltz is working with a coalition of local research centers and biotech firms to apply cutting-edge tools to treat patients and fight the disease.

Foltz and his colleagues genetically map each patient's tumor and examine its genes to determine their pattern, as this profile describes. The Allen Institute, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, provides genetic maps of healthy brain tissue for comparison. The genetic information can help Foltz predict how the cancer will behave and respond to various treatments and extend the lives of his patients.

Previously published brain cancer gene data has contained anatomic information from whole tumor samples, but little or no information about the gene activity.

For the atlas project, tumor tissue samples will be collected at Swedish and then sent to the Allen Institute for studying the target genes. Very thin strips will be digitally photographed and the cells and genes plotted on a 3-D map.

Research on the atlas project is scheduled to be completed in 2013. The information it produces will be made available online for free use by medical and scientific communities around the world.

Add two new weapons to the potential arsenal against malaria -- chewing gum and chocolate.

They are among dozens of unconventional approaches to global health problems that won backing today from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is giving out 76 grants of $100,000 each to researchers in 16 countries.

The awards known as Grand Challenges Explorations, smaller and riskier bets the foundation is making to encourage creativity among scientists around the world, include people in areas such as chemistry, engineering, statistics and business who have never focused on health before.

The third round of projects explore new low-cost ways to diagnose diseases, fight malaria and HIV, and find more effective vaccines. Among the winners:

• Andrew Fung of the University of California, Los Angeles, aims to develop chewing gum that can detect the presence of malaria in a person's saliva. Fung calls his diagnostic tool "MALiVA." During chewing, particles in the gum will react with malaria proteins, which can be detected and characterized when the gum is scanned with a magnet.
• Kate Edwards at the University of San Diego will study whether a brief bout of exercise can make a pneumonia vaccine work better.
• Steven Maranz of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York will test a compound contained in chocolate to find out whether providing children high levels of flavanols, found in chocolate, green tea and nuts, deprives malaria parasites of lipids needed to survive, keeping the infection at levels low enough to elicit a strong immune response and build lifelong immunity.
• Ranjan Nanda of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology in India will attempt to create a handheld "electronic nose" that gathers and analyzes breath samples to diagnose tuberculosis.
• Margaret Njoroge of Med Biotech Laboratories in Uganda will develop a nasal vaccine for mothers, designed to induce antibodies against malaria in breast milk and pass that immunity on to their babies.
• Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are attempting to marry a microscope with a cell phone to capture high-contrast fluorescent images of malaria parasites, with software on the phone that can count the parasites and wirelessly transmit the results to clinics.

The foundation is currently considering applications for the fourth round of funding, which closes on Nov. 2, and it's adding a new topic this time around -- new technologies for birth control.

Seeking novel solutions to an old problem, the foundation notes that family planning is one of the most cost effective ways to reduce deaths among mothers and children, but 200 million women in developing countries lack effective contraception.

So far, 262 researchers from 30 countries have been awarded grants through the Grand Challenges program, a five-year, $100 million initiative to promote innovation in global health.

Since the projects are so experimental, I'll be interested to see how the first ones have fared a year after their initial funding, and whether any of them are going on to the next stage in November. Successful projects can compete for a follow-on grant of $1 million or more, but no such grants have been awarded yet.

By Sandi Doughton

Health experts around the globe were chilled earlier this year by the discovery that malaria in Cambodia has evolved resistance to the most promising drug in medicine's arsenal.

With the effectiveness of artemisinin under threat, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up its investment in new malaria drugs with a $115 million grant to the Geneva-based Medicines for Malaria Venture. The grant brings the foundation's total funding for the group to $317 million.

Malaria has long been a top priority for the Gateses, who in 2007 took the controversial step of calling for eradication of the disease. Many experts question whether that will ever be possible, but foundation CEO Jeff Raikes recently said the world's biggest philanthropy is refocusing its malaria programs with the goal of eradication in mind.

The "E-word," which some malaria scientists utter with trepidation based on past failures, is repeated three times in MMV's four-paragraph press release on the new grant.

In February, MMV and drugmaker Novartis introduced a sweet-tasting version of the combination malaria drug Coartem for African children. The group is funding work on more than 50 drug candidates, ten of which are in clinical development.

Last night Nicholas Kristof told the story of a boy on a beach who collected starfish washed onto the sand and threw them back into the ocean one by one. A man came along and told him he'd never make a difference, but the boy replied "It sure made a difference to that one."

What if there were thousands, or even millions of boys and girls on the beach, an entire clean up crew, and each one saved at least one starfish?

That is the possibility in cities like Seattle.

A city where each citizen is linked to another citizen of a city somewhere in the world that needs our help.

We have sister city programs where delegations of bureaucrats go visit each other and talk about expanding ties. That's the old paradigm. So here's my idea: take Seattle's enormous talents, compassion and global perspective, and scale it up.

Time for the younger generation to redefine this civic pillar and make it really meaningful.

Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is, in the words of Dylan. A whole generation is looking at the world in a new way and is hungry to change it. These are the students who pack auditoriums and line up for hours to meet their rock stars - the Paul Farmers and Kavita Ramdases and Nicholas Kristofs of the world.

Three years ago an 11-year-old girl, Jessica Markowitz, decided to help educate girls in Rwanda. She traveled back and forth, raised more than $30,000, and now she's expanding her partnership to high schools in Seattle and Kigali. At Bellevue High School Brett Mennella helped start a microfinance club, which raised more than $130,000 for a local non-profit helping poor entrepreneurs, and now five other high schools have followed his lead. There are countless other examples here and in cities across the U.S.

Everyone knows the wealth system today is unequal. As Kristof said, we who won the birth lottery buy lattes and iPods while kids overseas starve. But we as individuals have the power to change it ourselves right now, and even the technology.

The Kiva model has shown the possibilities for transformation when one person uses the Internet to send one tiny bit of her resources to one other person.

Joe Mallahan would like it, from what I hear about his ideas to use mobile phones for social business. Mike McGinn would like it, from what I hear about his enthusiasm for grassroots environmental movements.

Someone in Edmonds liked the idea, because he made sure every one of its 43,000 residents could give $1 to help Carol Schillios save girls in Mali.

Kristof also told us about a $10,000 bank mistake that saved a school in China that was able to waive $13 in school fees for each of the girls, who became accountants and sent money back to their town, which got a road built and attracted more investment, which made life better for everyone. A virtuous cycle.

What if we could change a whole town in a place like Cambodia or Cameroon, and create a new sister cities model for others? Take soft power right down to the local level.

We have 602,000 residents in Seattle, and most of them can afford a latte. Some school in some town with a poor girl who can't afford an education is just waiting for us to notice.

Gates Foundation Chief Executive Jeff Raikes has deeply personal ties to agriculture. He grew up on a farm outside of Omaha, Nebraska, that has belonged to his family for generations. Raikes counted Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, among his heroes.

Earlier this year Raikes paid a visit to Borlaug at his home in Texas. Raikes had wanted to meet Borlaug at the World Food Prize gathering in Iowa, but he knew Borlaug's illness would make it impossible for him to attend. Borlaug passed away Sept. 12.

Borlaug was having some trouble with his hearing, but overall "he was doing amazingly well for somebody who is 94 years old battling cancer."

JAMES A. FINLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nobel Peace Prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, pictured in 2005.

Raikes' burning question - what went wrong in Africa?

"When I asked him about Africa he immediately launched into a discussion about the importance of maintaining the investments and the commitment to wheat rust," Raikes said.

Last year, the Gates Foundation gave Cornell University $27 million to create a global partnership to combat the disease, called the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project.

A particularly virulent strain, called Ug99 because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999, has spread from Africa and can infect crops in hours. Clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

Borlaug's concern about the wheat rust problem reflected something larger, Raikes said. "What he was saying is that governments had not maintained their commitment to international agricultural development at the level they should have."

"What I took away from that conversation was how important it was to maintain the commitment to invest in agriculture when things like the opportunity for higher yield crops that better withstand wheat rust or drought are very important to food security."

Raikes sat with him for over an hour. While Borlaug had recently undergone chemotherapy and didn't get up from his chair, "his level of energy was quite impressive," Raikes said.

Borlaug is one of only a handful of people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

When Raikes visited, Borlaug's family was in the process of moving the awards from their safety deposit box to Texas A&M University, and showed Raikes the Congressional medal.

On the back of the medal is Borlaug's famous creed: "The first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind."

Raikes accidentally dropped the medal, which landed on Borlaug's knee.

"I tested his reflexes and his reflexes were great," Raikes laughed.

Update: I wrote a little more about this partnership in my story today. What's at the heart of this effort seems to be identifying the most urgent health needs of Pro Mujer's clients in Nicaragua and then using microcredit to create a model to finance solutions that are both affordable for the clients and sustainable for the non-profit. Currently the health programs are subsidized by the financial arm.

The partners say they hope the model can be applied anywhere.

"Microfinance alone, healthcare alone or education alone cannot solve all of the issues of poverty," remarked David Valle, CEO of Esperanza International, a Bellevue-based non-profit that is integrating microfinance, healthcare and education in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. "But when these solutions are combined...now you have something powerful!"

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Local non-profits Global Partnerships and PATH will work together on a global health initiative using microfinance to reach women in Latin America.

The two will work with Pro Mujer, an organization that funds microcredit cooperatives in Latin America and combines small loans with other services, such as business training and regular health checkups. More details on the partnership are expected next week.

Microcredit, with networks reaching millions of people in developing countries, is thought to be a promising way to distribute health solutions and other services to the rural poor.

One innovative program by Pro Mujer provides health screenings using a van retrofitted with consultation rooms and staffed by medical personnel. Global Partnerships CEO Rick Beckett described the mobile health clinics in a recent presentation about Pro Mujer's work to provide cervical cancer testing to its borrowers in Peru.

The health screenings increased the number of women tested from one third to about 95 percent over four years, and revealed treatable tumors that could prove fatal if undetected.

Global Partnerships has committed about $52 million toward microfinance in Latin America and is working to help Pro Mujer find a financially sustainable way to fund such health programs.

It's a natural fit for PATH, which could contribute its health systems expertise for the developing world, along with potential technology and commercial partners.

Update Friday: The University of Washington said this morning that it will use $25 million in Recovery Act funding from NIH to create a new Northwest Genomics Center and explore the origins of common heart, lung and blood disorders.

The UW will receive two of the six "Grand Opportunity" large-scale DNA sequencing project awards to examine the genetic connections to the diseases, which account for three of the leading causes of death in the United States.

UW Professor Debbie Nickerson is one of the principal investigators for the two-year national project. She said the new center "will apply cutting edge, next generation sequencing technology to uncover the differences in our genetic code and explore how these may influence traits, such as cholesterol and blood pressure, that impact our risk for developing cardiovascular disease."

The UW center is one of two sequencing centers for the project, with the second located at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.

"This is one of those times in science when it is just the right moment to scale newly emerging technologies to obtain important medical insights," Nickerson said.

Washington State University said it has received more than $30 million in 42 federal stimulus funding awards, including $9 million from the National Science Foundation, $5 million from NIH and Health and Human Services, and $16 million in Commerce, Energy and other funding related to the Recovery Act.

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Hundreds of health research projects in Washington state have received federal stimulus funding of about $170 million, led by the University of Washington, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The updated NIH database lists millions of dollars in federal stimulus funding to Seattle researchers studying the effectiveness of various cancer diagnostic tools, screening tests and treatments.

On Monday researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, UW and Group Health Cooperative will describe their projects, supported by the National Cancer Institute, that are helping to build a hub for cutting-edge cancer research in Seattle. Of the 385 projects funded in Washington state, 359 of them were in the Seattle area.

My colleague Sandi Doughton wrote about the potential windfall from the $787 billion stimulus package to locally-based scientific research efforts earlier this year.

President Obama announced the funding Wednesday as part of a plan to spend $5 billion on medical and scientific research, medical supplies and upgrading laboratory capacity. The funds come from the $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Washington State University has received close to $3 million, including $1.5 million to professor Norman G. Lewis for a project to classify medicinal plants into a comprehensive database to aid the discovery of new medicines. (NIH only lists funding of $1.46 million for the first year, but the total award is $2.75 million, Lewis said.)

One standout nationwide was the UW, which has had more than 240 projects funded so far for a total of $99 million. At UW, professor Debbie Nickerson leads a project to study human genome variation that received $11 million this year.

Besides scientific research, Recovery Act dollars also went toward social services. Building Changes, a Seattle-based non-profit focused on ending homelessness, received a $1 million grant to provide technical assistance and grants to smaller non-profits serving the homeless and at-risk or very low-income families.

Building Changes is one of 35 organizations in the U.S. awarded money through the Strengthening Communities Fund, which aims to improve the ability of non-profits to help low-income people recover from the recession. Other recipients in Washington state include Seattle's Human Services Department and the Confederate Tribes of Colville Reservation, which received about $250,000 each, and the Northwest Leadership Foundation, which received $1 million.

The Institute for Systems Biology was chosen to receive nearly $8 million in federal funds for research into the genetic causes of cancer and potential targeted treatments.

A member of the Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, ISB will analyze data gathered by research centers around the country with the goal of learning how environmental factors affect genes and cause cells to malfunction, leading to cancer. ISB will then use the knowledge to identify drug targets and therapeutic treatments. The principal investigator at ISB is Ilya Shmulevich.

The Research Network has initially focused on cancers of the brain, breast, kidney, lungs and ovaries. Part of ISB's role is to develop state-of-the-art software and other tools that assist researchers with processing and integrating data analysis.

The award is $7.88 million over five years, with $3.1 million of the funding approved so far, according to the National Institutes of Health. The project is jointly run by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both under the NIH.

Note: The ISB funding was not, as I reported yesterday based on information from ISB, part of the federal stimulus package announced by President Obama in a plan to spend $5 billion on medical and scientific research, medical supplies and upgrading laboratory capacity.

Funding for the Cancer Genome Atlas came from two different sources -- $175 million from the Recovery Act and $100 million pledged jointly by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute.

The cancer research funds came to ISB from that second pool of $100 million, ISB spokesman Todd Langton said Thursday. ISB did receive Recovery Act funds -- a $2.3 million grant to complete an atlas of human peptides and a $200,000 grant to study how external factors combine with genetic factors to drive asthma attacks.

A full list of NIH grants as part of the Recovery Act is available here. Other large grants awarded in Washington state include $8.5 million to the Northwest Institute of Genetic Medicine at UW and $8.3 million to the Allen Institute for Brain Science. In fact, various UW researchers have racked up a total of more than $80 million in NIH grants this year alone.

ISB, a non-profit research institute on the north end of Lake Union, is hiring an additional eight people and dedicating some of its existing full time positions to the project, ISB spokesman Todd Langton said.

The institute is pioneering an approach to medicine it calls P4 -- predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory. The idea is that future medicine will consider the unique biology of an individual and his or her probability of developing various diseases, and then design appropriate treatments before a disease manifests.

More than 1,500 Americans die from cancer every day, according to the NIH, and the rate is expected to rise as the U.S. population ages.

Pro Mujer, an organization that funds microcredit cooperatives in Latin America, also provides women's health screenings, using a special van retrofitted with medical consultation rooms and staffed by a nurse and doctor.

The vans travel into remote parts of southern Peru, combining financial help with preventative health care and education.

COURTESY OF PRO MUJER

Women in Peru get health care during meetings of their microcredit group in a program of Pro Mujer, a non-profit supported by Seattle-based Global Partnerships. The van combines mobile banking with health services to rural areas..

It's based on a simple fact that people who are poor tend to get sick, and people who are sick easily become poor, or deeper in debt. Rick Beckett, CEO of Global Partnerships, gave the example of Pro Mujer's work at a talk last night about the future of microfinance.

About 150 million people around the world have borrowed money through the system of microcredit pioneered by the Grameen Bank. Once the model showed promise, investors started flocking to it.

The last decade has seen an explosion of commercialization, exemplified by Compartamos, a lucrative Mexican bank that started as a non-profit but ended up going public in 2007 and now charges more than 80 percent interest on microloans.

Commercialization is necessary for raising the amount of money needed to get microcredit to the millions who could benefit, Beckett said. But the profit-motive also leads lenders to bypass the poorest people.

Commercial capital goes to the most profitable microfinance institutions. It turns out that poor people at the bottom are not as profitable as others farther up, and it's easier to make money in dense urban areas than in rural ones, he said.

The situation has parallels with healthcare in the U.S. "Economic incentives are very powerful," he said. "You can make a lot more money in health care if you serve healthy 65-year-olds than sick 89-year-olds."

Beckett, who had an earlier career as an investor and led the healthcare practice for McKinsey & Co, said the U.S. needs "vibrant, well capitalized insurance providers that have a different economic motivation" and "socially motivated, probably non-profit insurance coverage."

Likewise the microfinance industry needs organizations like Pro Mujer that make a profit but reinvest it in the effort to improve lives.

Pro Mujer's mobile medical clinics provide cervical cancer testing. Before joining the organization, only about one-third of the women had ever had a gynecological exam. Eventually 95 percent of them had been tested. In Nicaragua, Pro Mujer helped give 9,000 tests over four years, which detected tumors in 700 women who otherwise would not have known they needed treatment.

Global Partnerships is now working on a business enterprise for Pro Mujer so it has a long-term source of funding for the healthcare services. The Seattle non-profit has committed about $52 million toward microfinance in Latin America.

Testing for cervical cancer in developing countries is getting some help from Merck and QIAGEN. The companies said today they would collaborate on a new program to increase access to HPV vaccination and HPV DNA testing in some of the poorest areas of the world, calling the partnership the first time a vaccine manufacturer and a molecular diagnostics company are addressing the burden of cervical cancer together with a comprehensive approach.

Their commitments were announced at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is planning to use its massive endowment to offer $400 million in new low-interest loans, loan guarantees and equity investments.

It's a significant step by the world's largest private charity to use more of its $30 billion in assets to finance program-related investing. I first wrote about the idea here.

The $400 million will be used for a range of new opportunities, including charter school expansion, agricultural financing for small farmers in Africa, and investment in global health technologies, according to people familiar with the plan.

The program-related investments or PRIs will be managed by Gates Foundation Chief Financial Officer Alexander Friedman and his staff. The Gates Foundation will seek partners for joint investments, aligned with its strategies in areas such as global health, U.S. education, agricultural development and financial services for the poor, to more than double the total funding.

U.S. foundations have hundreds of billions of dollars in their endowments, but pay out just 5 percent of the total each year. Meanwhile the economic downturn has forced them to think about new ways to achieve their charitable goals. Foundation endowments plunged an average of 26 percent last year.

How did a tiny non-profit in Fremont attract the attention of a global pharmaceutical giant, a multinational beverage company, governments from India to Senegal and a $1.4 million investment announced this morning by a European venture fund?

COURTESY OF VILLAGEREACH

Women in Mozambique walk for miles and wait for a rural health center to open. The health center is among those supported by Seattle-based VillageReach. .

VillageReach has figured how to get health care into the heart of remote communities that others haven't managed to reach -- the so-called "last mile" -- and pay for it with a for-profit energy business.

With billions of dollars being spent to develop new vaccines, bridging the last mile can mean the difference between lifesaving drugs getting stuck in a bottleneck or reaching the people who need them most.

VillageReach applied a logistics model for delivering and tracking vaccines in remote settings similar to the way UPS might deliver its packages. In fact, VillageReach hired a veteran UPS employee to help improve its operations and industry partnerships.

COURTESY OF VILLAGEREACH

A health center in rural Mozambique is powered by propane supplied by Vida Gas, a company half owned by Seattle-based VillageReach.

The problem typical in developing countries is that medical supplies from big donors like Unicef reach the capital or nearest port city, and national authorities distribute them as far as the provinces, but that's where they sit waiting to be picked up by local health workers -- when they have the time and transportation.

"It's as if your mail is only delivered up to Olympia," said VillageReach President Allen Wilcox.

VillageReach moved that work from a collection-based system to one with dedicated distributors, freeing up health workers to focus on treating patients.

VillageReach worked with the government in Mozambique to set up a fleet of seven trucks and seven field coordinators whose sole job is to get vaccines, equipment and medicines to 261 rural health centers. VillageReach helped acquire some of the vehicles initially, but the trucks are owned and operated by the government health authority.

The field coordinators return to two central offices that have laptops and Internet access, and upload information into an online database. They report what supplies were distributed, how many vaccines were given out and how much inventory was left.
VillageReach has been able to assemble a detailed picture of what is happening at each health center with updates every two weeks, said John Beale, strategic development director, "so we can see the trends for better or worse."

VillageReach can then share the online data with partners in Seattle and with policy makers in Geneva. The management information system VillageReach has developed is receiving a 2009 Tech Award from the Technology Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley. In Mozambique its program has helped boost vaccination rates from 68 percent to 95 percent, according to an independent study cited by the non-profit.

In a country like Mozambique, where cars and even bicycles are rare, people walk for miles to reach medical care. It's important they find something at the end of the road, said Beale. "The greatest benefit we provide is community confidence in the health care system."

The non-profit supports its work with a propane gas business that also powers much needed refrigeration for the medicine.

The population of northern Mozambique lives largely off the electrical grid. Less than 10 percent of the country has electricity, so most people cook and heat with charcoal or wood.

VillageReach needed energy for critical health services such as sterilizing equipment, helping mothers through childbirth at night and keeping vaccines cold. Propane was their only viable fuel option.

Being entrepreneurs, they launched a company called VidaGas to supply it themselves. The alternative would have been to use donations to buy propane, Beale said, but once those dollars ran out, so would the cold chain upon which the health system depended. "The whole program would not be sustainable," he said.

In 2002 VillageReach partnered with a local non-profit, the Foundation for Community Development, to start VidaGas. (The foundation is headed by Graca Machel, Nelson Mandela's wife. The two paid a visit to Seattle in 1999 and received $30 million for their charities from local donors.)

VidaGas sells gas to the region, offering a cleaner alternative to charcoal, and it's now the largest propane distributor in northern Mozambique. Besides supplying energy for the health system, it's fueling the hotel and tourist industries, small retailers and family homes.

VillageReach is holding up VidaGas as an example of a successful social business that supports a humanitarian mission. Harvard Business School recently published a study of its model for integrating global health programs with social businesses to benefit remote communities.

Luxembourg-based Oasis Capital today announced it will make a $1.4 million investment in VidaGas, which will allow the company to expand its services to more customers and to build additional filling stations.

VillageReach has been hired by the World Health Organization and Seattle-based PATH for a pilot project in Senegal, and by a large pharmaceutical company to conduct a health strengthening program in a remote part of India. The non-profit is also working with a multinational beverage maker to use its vast transport networks to help distribute medical supplies.

Its goal is nothing short of a sea change in global health practices.

"What is unique about VillageReach is we are trying to enhance systems that exist and leave behind a legacy of infrastructure improvements to allow the system to sustain itself," Wilcox said.

Billions of people around the world eat rice as a daily staple. To make it more nutritious,
Seattle-based PATH is taking ordinary rice, blending it with micro nutrients and molding it into fortified rice-like grains.

PATH's new Ultra Rice is being introduced around the world to solve vitamin and mineral deficiencies that cause a host of health problems, from birth defects to blindness.

PHOTO COURTESY OF PATH

Ultra Rice in bins ready for serving to a school in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India.

Tomorrow the Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose is recognizing the global health non-profit's work on Ultra Rice with a 2009 Tech Award, given to innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

It will be the third Tech Award PATH has received from the museum. PATH was a Health Award Laureate for its heat-sensitive vaccine vial monitor in 2007 and for its pre-filled Uniject syringes for vaccine delivery in 2003.

Ultra Rice was pioneered by a local father-and-son team, Dr. James P. Cox and his son, R. W. Duffy Cox. at Lynden-based Bon Dente International, the creators of technologies from oyster shucking equipment to methods of eliminating salmonella in eggs. In 1997, the Cox family donated the Ultra Rice patent to PATH.

PHOTO COURTESY OF PATH

School girls in a meal program in India eat fortified Ultra Rice developed by Seattle-based PATH.

Ultra Rice is now being developed by PATH under Project Director Dipika Matthias, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. PATH has already introduced Ultra Rice into large-scale meal programs funded by governments to test its benefits.

PATH launched a pilot program in December with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Naandi Foundation in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Success depends on how effectively Ultra Rice can be commercialized. PATH is now trying to demonstrate successful models of supply and demand.

The non-profit partners with local pasta manufacturers to produce the Ultra Rice grains and works with rice millers and government food programs to blend and distribute the fortified rice.

It has licensed the technology to commercial partners in Brazil, India and Colombia, who are required to make their Ultra Rice grains available to public-sector buyers and consumers at preferential prices. PATH expects the price of fortified rice to be between 2 and 5 percent higher than the cost of traditional rice.

Longevity Vita Bio-Tech, PATH's first commercial partner in China, plans to integrate pasta-extrusion machinery into its Beijing factory to produce Ultra Rice grains. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention owns part of Longevity Vita and will help introduce the product in China, according to PATH.

Besides PATH, previous Tech Award winners in health include DataDyne, which developed an open-source program for healthcare workers to collect and share data using mobile devices, and MedMira, which invented technology for a single test to detect HIV and hepatitis in three minutes.

The Tech Award winners are honored at an annual gala in San Jose, and one laureate in each award category receives a $50,000 cash prize. This year's awards gala will be held on Nov. 19.

The Jolkona Foundation has added Seattle education and microfinance projects to its Web site, allowing people to reach local programs with targeted small donations.

The non-profit created by husband and wife team Adnan Mahmud and Nadia Eleza Khawaja launched its Web site in June, aiming at younger donors. I profiled their venture here.

Now Jolkona is partnering with the Technology Access Foundation (TAF) and the Washington Community Alliance for Self Help (CASH).

The two TAF projects aim to reduce educational disparities between students of different racial backgrounds in the Pacific Northwest. Donors can fund after-school programs for students of color in underprivileged neighborhoods in Seattle and Federal Way. For $50, donors can sponsor snacks and field trips for TAF's TechStart program, or sponsor student council activity and books at TAF Academy. Donors receive photos from students and lists of the books purchased.

The project with Washington CASH provides money for business training to micro-loan borrowers in Washington, where 26 percent of the population is considered "working poor." Donors can fund business training for borrowers for $30, or sponsor a client to attend the non-profit's eight-week Business Development Training course for $375.

"We love Seattle and we are glad that we can utilize our platform to assist TAF and Washington CASH in addressing some of the biggest needs in our hometown," said Mahmud. "We believe poverty and lack of education are not only problems in remote villages of Africa and Asia but also close to home."

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $4.8 million to a project to identify new methods of on-site sanitation in developing countries.

The grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine supports a three-year project to research and develop new concepts for sanitation such as improving pit latrines, which are the only option for about 1.7 billion people without access to sewage systems. The London School will research how advances in biotechnology, using enzymes and micro-organisms to convert plant waste to biofuel, for example, might be applied to sanitation.

The London School also received the $1 million Gates Award for Global Health this year.

The Gates Foundation's program on water, sanitation and hygiene is only about three years old but has grown to 19 grants so far totaling about $160 million.

Unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world. Improving them could prevent one tenth of global diseases, according to the World Health Organization. About 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses every year.

With its water-related grants, the Gates Foundation has funded low-cost, practical solutions that can be commercialized.

Among the recipients is Seattle-based PATH, which is exploring water quality through a $17 million, five-year grant to help develop low-cost filters, gadgets and other water-treatment products.

In 2008 the foundation gave $13 million to an international consortium led by the University of Bristol to develop Aquatest, a simple diagnostic tool that can give a reliable indication of whether water sampled is safe or not.

Since little research has focused on the development and use of pit latrines, the London School said it aims to build knowledge about decomposition processes and evaluate the potential of biotechnology and improved design to accelerate decomposition.

Its goal is to find solutions that can be turned into affordable, sustainable products available on the market. Researchers say such innovations can improve health and reduce costs for sanitation in an environmentally safe manner. The project will combine academic and industrial expertise and provide an innovation fund to turn promising ideas into prototypes.

Locally another non-profit, Seattle-based Water 1st, has been working on projects that integrate water supply, sanitation and health education in four countries, taking safe water as the basis for ending poverty.

Seattle-based PATH announced today it has won the world's largest humanitarian award, the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, for its work creating effective health technologies for the developing world.

Hilton Foundation Chief Executive Steven M. Hilton, who introduced the award during a press conference this morning, said PATH's work helping to develop 85 technologies, along with its commitment to sharing ideas and making sure products are sold at affordable prices, have had a profound impact on alleviating human suffering. More coverage of the award is here.

COURTESY OF PATH/PATRICK MCKERN

PATH CEO Christopher Elias (left) and Conrad N. Hilton Foundation CEO Steven M. Hilton (right) tour PATH's Seattle headquarters following the announcement that PATH has won the 2009 Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

The prestigious award is well deserved recognition for the long-term efforts of its staff, who often work years before seeing the results, PATH Chief Executive Chris Elias said. PATH now has 850 employees working in 20 countries.

Its Seattle headquarters near the base of the Ballard Bridge buzzed with excitement as the news was announced this morning.

The award "will open many doors" for future goals, Elias said, and PATH plans to capitalize on the recognition to expand its partnerships around the world.

PATH will use the $1.5 million in prize money to seed an innovation fund aimed at investing in new technology and health interventions, he said. PATH will begin a five-year drive aimed at raising a total of $25 million for the innovation fund.

The non-profit has an annual budget of $250 million, 65 percent from foundations, 30 percent from governments, and 5 percent from global organizations. Only a small percent of the contributions are unrestricted, a portion Elias calls "innovation capital."

Through the innovation fund, Elias aims to raise the amount of flexible capital from about 3 percent to about 10 percent of PATH's budget.

PATH has used such capital in the past to set up an office in South Africa, which could then begin applying for grants and offering programs that had been successful in East Africa to address similar health problems. Five years later the South Africa office, focused on improving maternal and newborn health, has grown to one of PATH's largest, with a staff of more than 30 people.

"Innovation capital can respond to emerging needs and opportunities," he said.

One goal of the fund is to invest in taking technology innovations that come from 21st century scientific discoveries, such as new diagnostic tools, and applying them to affordable products for the developing world, he said.

The fund will also be used to increase the usage of essential health products PATH has developed and to expand its field presence, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, Elias said.

The Hilton Foundation will present the award to PATH formally at a Sept. 21 ceremony in Washington D.C with keynote speaker Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate, founder of the Grameen Bank, and former Hilton Prize juror. PATH, which had been nominated for the Hilton award in the past, was the winner this year among about 200 nominees.

EarthWise spent 10 months building its first ferry aimed at restoring transportation and trade to Africa's largest lake. Now it's time to cut it all apart.

I wrote a story describing the unusual venture and its founders, Rob Smith and Calvin Echodu, in today's paper.

EarthWise will unveil the ferry in a celebration tomorrow before dismantling it and packing it inside four 40-foot containers bound for Kampala, Uganda, where local workers will begin the process of reassembling it.

JOHN LOK/SEATTLE TIMES

Rob Smith is heading an effort to build ferries for a new passenger service in Africa from his small boat building company in Everett.

At one time 30 percent of the Ugandan economy depended on the ferry system and the trade and travel it made possible. If some of that can be restored, Smith and his partners believe it will create jobs, increased tourism and other benefits to the region.

EarthWise will be collaborating with Columbia University and with Jeffrey Sachs' Millennium Villages project to process Jatropha, a plant used to make biofuel, as an alternative to diesel for the ferries.

EarthWise, Thain Boatworks and the Pacific Northwest African Chamber of Commerce are hosting the farewell event August 18 from 4 p.m. at Thain Boatworks, 1420 West Marine View Drive in Everett. The event is open to the public. To attend send RSVP to darcy@earthwiseventures.com.

As for the name, EarthWise plans to hold a contest among elementary schools in Uganda to name the boat after a prominent person in the country's history.

This post was written by Linda Shaw

Two early-learning efforts -- one in the Seattle area and one in Yakima -- received another $8 million in funding from Thrive by Five Washington and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The White Center Early Learning Initiative and East Yakima's Ready by Five each will receive $4 million over the next year. Those donations follow first-round grants last year of $11.7 million to the White Center initiative, and $5 million to East Yakima.

Both initiatives are working to substantially increase high-quality learning opportunities for children from birth to age 5.

In the past year, the White Center Early Learning Initiative broke ground on an early learning center that will open this winter. It also started the Outreach Doula program, a home-visiting program that supports Somali and Latino families with health, child development, and early learning information.

The Yakima program worked with the Yakima School District to bring kindergartners to school two weeks early to help them get acquainted with their teachers, classmates, routines and expectations. It also started a monthly program to help parents learn more about how to help their children learn.

Washington State University is known for its agricultural expertise, knowledge that it spreads around the world through a dozen international development projects. Now it's linking those programs with online giving in a new initiative called Ripple Effect.

The idea is to give donors a direct way to support WSU's mission and improve the livelihoods of people in the countries where it operates. The Ripple Effect Web site features concrete items such as trees, treadle pumps, stoves, seeds for crops, goats or honey bees, which donors can purchase for rural communities where WSU works. The cost ranges from as little as $16 for a seeds kit to $1,024 for a full share of a honey bee kit.

The program, owned and operated by the WSU Foundation, gives students, alumni and others a chance to engage in philanthropy at a level they can afford and way they can understand, said Scott Garrepy WSU development director for international programs. He thinks WSU may be the first major university in the U.S. to try online '"retail philanthropy."

Each gift fits into a system connected with various aspects of village life and with WSU's larger goals of sustainable development, he said.

WSU's goals include improving the sustainable management of natural resources through tree planting and reduced wood consumption, increasing farm productivity to strengthen food security and nutrition, and improving health standards through safe water and sanitation.

WSU has worked in Malawi, since 1986, planting trees, creating conservation agriculture programs and building primary schools, fuel efficient stoves and small scale irrigation, through Total Land Care, a Malawian non-governmental organization it helped set up.

"WSU's efforts to help people help themselves in developing nations rank among our most important, and least recognized, initiatives," said WSU President Elson Floyd. "Ripple Effect allows every contributor to see who they are helping and how they are making a very real difference in the lives of struggling people half a world away."

Ripple Effect has a lot in common with other online philanthropy start-ups I've written about such as Jolkona Foundation and See Your Impact. The program takes the popular concept of online micro-giving and applies it to education.

Garrepy said the university is also using Twitter to spread the word, and its RippleEffectWSU profile page now has more than 1,500 followers.

"With budget crunch issues, we've had to be creative about how to raise awareness of the site," he said. "Social media is a very important and effective tool for us."

Gifts are received by WSU Foundation and transferred to the university's International Research and Development Department. WSU staff on the ground secure the items and services and deliver them to families and villages in Malawi.

"If one goat kit and two tree seedling kits are purchased through the Ripple Effect Web site, then one goat kit and two tree seedling kits will go exactly where they are most needed in Malawi," said Garrepy.

Hopelink will open the doors to a new food bank today that uses the model of a grocery store to let people make their own choices and shop at their convenience.

Where traditional food banks hand out food items in a line at a set time and date, Hopelink's new Kirkland center mirrors a grocery store where people can choose their own canned goods, baked goods, produce, meat and dairy items from cases and shelves. The store has both daytime and evening hours.

To use the food bank, people have to first qualify and register at Hopelink, where they are matched with services aimed to help them move toward self-sufficiency. The grocery store uses a point system to provide people with a food budget based on family size.

Since many of Hopelink's clients have jobs and children in school, a food bank offering flexible hours is an advantage. Food banks all over the region have seen a surge in demand during the economic downturn.

The supermarket-style model was first developed by the University District Food Bank (a separate non-profit from Food Lifeline) in 2007. Food Lifeline then recognized University District Food Bank with an award a year later for exemplary approaches to ending hunger.

In addition to food, the new Hopelink center will offer a one-stop-shop for other services, including adult education, emergency financial assistance, a jobs program and help for families with children.

Hopelink's new center replaces two of its other centers in Kirkland and Bothell and is located at 11011 120th Avenue N.E. in the Totem Lake area. For more information call 425-889-7880.

Update: Just learned about AmpleHarvest, a nationwide effort to link local food pantries with surplus produce from neighborhood gardens. It invites local pantries to list themselves and gardeners to visit the site, and "reach into their backyard instead of their back pocket."

Add philanthropy to the growing list of applications for mobile phones. One of the newest and most interesting innovations to combine philanthropy and technology is mobile giving.

Donating by text message is a new phenomenon, one that a Bellevue non-profit is pioneering by providing the platform to link donors to charities, as a story I wrote describes in detail today.

Mobile phone users can text a word such as HOPE (American Cancer Society), RIGHTS (Amnesty International), NET (Malaria No More), MEALS (Food Lifeline) or many others to a designated short code and contribute $5 or $10 to a cause. The Bellevue-based Mobile Giving Foundation acts as a clearinghouse for donations, helping non-profits set up codes and settling the billing between carriers and charities. The charges appear on donors' cell phone bills.

Mobile Giving Foundation CEO Jim Manis, a wireless industry veteran, got started helping set up a system for people to send donations for emergency relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami.

GREG GILBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

Jim Manis is working to expand mobile giving.

The system gave people a way to take action immediately in response to a need. Manis also saw it as a way to reach younger donors.

He persuaded U.S. mobile carriers to agree to process the donations free of charge (though they do earn something from text messaging charges). The foundation also works with a dozen service providers that create mobile fund raising campaigns for non-profits.

Text donation campaigns have been gaining momentum since the Super Bowl in 2008, which featured a commercial to text $5 to help a United Way youth fitness program.

Political campaigns have made extensive use of mobile phones and the Internet, and earlier this year the U.S. government started a drive to adopt new media in support of foreign policy by calling on Americans to text pledges to people in Pakistan through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In the future, there may be a way to text $5 directly to the phone of someone you want to help.

Mobile giving is just starting to catch on, but considering there are more than 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S alone (and more than 4 billion worldwide), it has the potential for power in numbers.

Real time information about farming, health and trading will be available to mobile phone users in Uganda with new technology services developed by the Grameen Foundation, Google and telecom operator MTN Uganda.

HEATHER THORNE/GRAMEEN FOUNDATION

Saurin Nanavati (left), a consultant for the AppLab project, explains how to use the new mobile applications to users in Uganda. AppLab aims to help Ugandans get health, agriculture and trading data on their mobile phones.

The Grameen Foundation saw the proliferation of mobile phones in Africa as a way to get information and services to poor communities in Uganda without Internet access. About 18 months ago it started a project called the Application Laboratory (AppLab), with much of the early work being done in Seattle through the Grameen Foundation's Technology Center. The first suite of those applications is being launched today.

Peter Bladin, Grameen Foundation executive vice president, said AppLab builds on the success of an earlier project, Village Phone, in which local entrepreneurs rent cell phone use to villagers for pennies a call. Uganda now has 50,000 Village Phone and pay phone operators and nine million cell phone subscribers.

Bladin said he sought out Google and MTN Uganda to help scale up the applications and roll them out to other parts of Africa, where Google has seven offices.

The new services can be accessed by existing Village phone operators, as well as by people with their own phones. They are SMS services that work on any phone capable of sending or receiving SMS messages, said Joseph Mucheru, Google's director of sub-Saharan Africa business. In Uganda almost all phones will be able to use the services, he said.

The five applications use Google SMS Search technology and MTN's telecom network. They include Farmer's Friend, a searchable database with agricultural advice and weather forecasts; Health Tips with sexual and reproductive health information, paired with Clinic Finder, to locate nearby health clinics; and Google Trader, which matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce, commodities and other products.

Local partners helped provide the content. The Busoga Rural Open Source Development Initiative (BRODSI) provides agricultural information created and tested by small-holder farmers, and Marie Stopes Uganda and the Straight Talk Foundation provide health information.

For the Google Trader application, AppLab worked with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, TechnoServe and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation to hone the concept with banana farmers and traders in Uganda.

Mobile phone users send an SMS query and receive an automatic answer back from the database. A farmer could ask a question about why the leaves on a tree are starting to wilt, or a mother could ask when her child needs a vaccine. Uganda has about 30 million people with an adult literacy rate of about 74 percent, according to the UN.

Prices for the services are 110 Uganda shillings per request (about 5 cents), on par with sending a text message to a friend in the country. Prices for requests to the trading marketplace are double, at 220 shillings per request.

Grameen Foundation President Alex Counts called the applications "a great example of innovation from and for the base of the pyramid," the billions of people who are at the bottom of the world's socio-economic hierarchy.

Randy Engstrom, founding director of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Seattle and an important voice in the arts community, received the 2009 Emerging Leader Award from Americans for the Arts, the country's leading non-profit for advancing the arts.

The award honors new and young leaders for extraordinary work in the field of arts administration, demonstrating innovative thinking, a commitment to the advancement of the arts, exemplary leadership qualities and impact on their communities. Engstrom is also a member of the Seattle Arts Commission.
Americans for the Arts honored another Seattle artist, Buster Simpson, with the 2009 Public Art Network Award for helping define contemporary and environmental art.

The awards come at a time when arts funding has come under increasing pressure from shrinking budgets of local governments, foundations and corporations hit by the economic downturn.

Youngstown is an example of how arts can benefit the community in a variety of ways. It's a multi-purpose arts education, meeting and performance space that includes 36 affordable live/work studios for rent to artists of all disciplines. The Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA), a private nonprofit based in West Seattle, rescued the historic school house turned boarded-up high school, raised $12 million and redeveloped it into what is now a vibrant cultural center, with Engstrom at the helm.

This story followed Engstrom just before he took that post, back in 2005 when he and Chris Airola helped build The Machine, a five-story wood-and-steel structure incorporating motion, sound, lights, smells and performance into what was to be the most elaborate art piece in the 20-year history of the desert festival known as Burning Man.

Engstrom's work at the festival caught the attention of Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, who brought him to San Francisco to talk to the organization about Seattle and how they could use their experience to spawn businesses and community organizations.

"Truth is," Harvey said of Engstrom and his Seattle group Static Factory Media, "they're doing something radical. They're doing something innovative."

Indeed.

A Kenyan Internet entrepreneur is planning to make her first loan -- to an American she's never met. She's doing it through the online micro lending Web site Kiva.org, which grew famous serving the developing world and is now expanding to include the working poor in the U.S.

Recognizing that poverty is everywhere, Kiva is starting to offer loans to U.S. borrowers today, a plan that has been in the works for some time. It's testing the waters to see how the service is used and whether it will help Americans in the midst of a credit crunch find ways to fund small businesses such as beauty salons, nurseries and bakeries.

CEO Matt Flannery mentioned the idea when he talked with me about the evolution of Kiva in a recent interview here. More than 500,000 people have used Kiva to make a total of $76 million in small loans to entrepreneurs featured on the site.

THOMAS AUCIELLO/SPECIAL TO THE SEATTLE TIMES

Silvia and Todor Believe received a Kiva loan to expand their firewood delivery business in Bulgaria.

In the U.S. market, the non-profit is working through two partners: ACCION USA and the Opportunity Fund in the Bay Area.

Locally Washington CASH also offers small business loans to local borrowers. While a small amount of capital is often what entrepreneurs in the developing world need,
getting a business off the ground in the U.S. has its own challenges. Keeping it running successfully can be even harder, so Washington CASH combines loans with training, such as creating a business plan, budgeting and marketing.

Kiva's U.S. micro loans come at an interesting time, with the global economy shifting precariously and unpredictably, and government rescue plans aimed at huge banks and corporations. Through its person-to-person economic stimulus plan. Kiva is giving individuals a new way to decide where and how to put their money to work helping others.

Whit Alexander hopes rechargeable batteries can give a boost to incomes of people in Ghana.

It's the first product in a new Seattle venture that Alexander has started called Burro, a for-profit company with a social mission: to help people in developing countries improve their productivity.

"Our mission is to profitably deliver affordable goods and services to empower the poor to do more with their lives," Alexander said.

AL SADANAGA

Hayford Atteh (left), field agent with new Seattle startup Burro, Philip Sarpong (center), the first Burro employee, and Burro founder Whit Alexander, a Microsoft veteran and co-founder of Cranium.

He started Burro last October, after waiting two decades to get back to the part of the world that held a special appeal for him since high school. He and his wife majored in African studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and Alexander later did consulting work in the region for World Bank projects.

After that came a five-year stint at Microsoft, where he created the Encarta world atlas, and then more than 10 years at Cranium, which he co-founded with Richard Tait. Now owned by Hasbro, Cranium closed its Seattle offices just last week.

"I'm coming up on 48 and I thought if I don't do this now when am I ever going to do it?" Alexander said of his new project.

The startup will focus on products that help people earn more income or provide a more affordable replacement for a product they're already buying.

He came up with the name Burro, using a symbol that is "a good animal in most cultures, hardworking and trustworthy, with extraordinary productivity," he said.

It also serves as a kind of "call to action" to do more, he said. "This isn't a handout."

Giving away the batteries wouldn't be sustainable, so Alexander had to figure out how to charge for them.

"The for-profit model is fundamental for me personally," he said. "We really do have to demonstrate that private enterprise can create opportunities that are sustainable, responsible and driving important social change."

He began by looking at where people were spending their money. People earning about $1 a day spend $2 to $6 a month on disposable batteries. Rechargeable batteries would save people money in the long run, but they couldn't afford the higher cost up-front, and most of them didn't have electricity to charge them.

So Alexander is introducing rechargeable batteries that people can rent rather than buy, and pick up through Burro agents who then take them to a central office to be recharged.
The customer pays a flat fee of 60 cents a month per battery, with unlimited exchanges for a fresh battery. Alexander figures his customers will get four times the energy of their standard batteries for about the same price.

He's starting in Ghana but believes the products could work well in many developing countries. For now, until he can prove the business model, Alexander says he's funding the venture himself with a lot of "donated sweat equity" from friends, including Jan Watson, Cranium's former operations manager.

Alexander is already experimenting with two additional products -- battery-powered lighting to replace kerosene and battery-powered cellphone charging. Both are significant expenses for people in Ghana.

BURRO

Burro produces rechargeable batteries for the West African market.

When Cranium closed its doors in Seattle last week, Alexander was there for the send-off with employees. "It was bittersweet," he said. "It's not the storybook ending we hoped for."

Now he's turning to a different market, one that relies on consumers in Africa and the uncertainties of their disposable incomes, which often fluctuate around harvest time.

"We are literally waiting for the corn to come in," he said.

As Seattle's new Express Credit Union makes its official debut this week, it turns the tables and tailors banking specifically to the needs of low-income people.

Its new model combines a credit union with policies and products designed to encourage savings, and a non-profit arm that can fund financial education. Accounts can be opened through local community service organizations, where people are already going for help.

Will that solve the problem for the estimated 20 percent of King County adults who lack a bank account? Recent legislation tackles some of the excess, but there is also debate about the merits of payday lenders. Meanwhile, Express predicts it will take about four years to become financially sustainable and not need to rely on grants.

COURTNEY BLETHEN/SEATTLE TIMES

Nathan Hawkins, a representative for Express Credit Union, helps members at the YWCA Opportunity Place downtown.

With Express rolling out its services to the public and hosting a "grand reopening" on Saturday, there are many questions about how it works, who qualifies and why it's taking on the payday lending industry.

While it aims to help people who have been rejected by banks in the past, not everyone will be accepted for all services. Clinton Jacob called me to say he was annoyed at having been turned down for a checking account at Express after the credit union looked up his history using the Chex system. Jacob owed $500 to a previous bank from a series of overdraft fees, charges which he considered unfair and did not intend to pay back.

Chief Executive Brenda Kurz said Express can't help every case.

"Every situation is very unique," she said. "We're willing to take that extra step and evaluate rather than turn people way."

In some cases, people can open a savings account and establish a six-month track record before being considered for other services like checking accounts and loans.

Express loans are not designed as payday loans, but as an alternative short-term loans with monthly payments, she said. Express offers repayment terms, and the loan is reported to credit reporting agencies so it can improve a credit score if paid back on time. Borrowers get a rebate of one-third of the loan fee once it's paid off, and no checking account is needed to qualify.

To illustrate how Express loans stack up to payday loans in cost, I asked for a detailed breakdown, which can be found here in a comparison chart.doc

Checking and savings accounts are free and can be opened with $5 or $10, along with free ATM use at a network of 300 locations.

Another program, Bank on Seattle, started last year as an effort to extend the services of commercial banks and credit unions to more "unbanked" low-income residents. Express is a member of that initiative.

The non-profit agencies offering Express services are YWCA, Catholic Community Services, the Refugee Women's Alliance, Solid Ground, Hopelink, Multi-Service Center of South King County, New Futures and Neighborhood House.

The agencies are getting grants from the new organization's non-profit arm to handle services like the financial education (which Hopelink is designing) and efforts to reach diverse immigrant communities through the Refugee Women's Alliance, whose staff members speak more than two dozen languages.

I've written a lot about microfinance, which proved to be one of the initial inspirations for Tricia McKay, executive director of the Medina Foundation, who came up with the idea and did years of research to develop a plan. The system of small loans to poor entrepreneurs also turned conventional thinking about banking on its head.

"I became convinced microfinance can and will change the world," she said. "Why is it we have payday lenders on every corner of low income neighborhoods and nothing like this for people in our own backyard?"

For now, Express is focused on King County, but anyone who lives or works in Washington can apply for membership. If the concept proves successful, McKay hopes it can spread and become a model for other communities.

It seems appropriate that PATH held its biggest event of the year not in a downtown hotel or restaurant but in a Ballard parking garage.

About 750 people packed into PATH's spiffed-up garage this morning for an annual fund raising breakfast, consisting of simple quinoa pudding, empanadas and flat breads.

The global health non-profit displayed some of the ways it channels its money into low tech but effective methods of improving health around the world, from a delivery kit for hygienic home births to a new female condom.

COURTESY OF PATH

A stream in the Korogocho slum of Nairobi is the only water source for thousands of people.

One of its most interesting new creations is called an "electro-chlorinator," which PATH developed with the help of Seattle-based outdoor gear maker Cascade Designs.

Disease persists in many parts of the world where garbage and sewage pollute water that people use for drinking, cooking and cleaning.

PATH CEO Chris Elias described such conditions in the Korogocho slum near Nairobi, where more than 100,000 people live in less than one square mile.

COURTESY OF PATH

A kiosk where local women in a Nairobi slum are selling purified water.

A year and a half ago, PATH used $20,000 from donors marked for "innovation funding," to create a new solution in Korogocho. Those funds are set aside to try riskier but potentially successful new ventures.

The goal was to find a way to provide safe, clean water to a community within the slum, Elias said. The two partners came up with a device that runs on little more than salt, water and electricity from a car battery.

It works by producing a chlorine solution that kills dangerous microbes, making the water safe to drink, he said.

PATH hired a local contractor to build a building with electrical power and a water tank, and a kiosk where the water and chlorine solution could be sold. Three local health workers were trained to operate the electro-chlorinator and six local women to dispense the chlorine solution and instructions.

In December, "the first customer bought ten jerry cans of the treated water, at a price of one Kenyan shilling per liter," he said. "That's a little more than a penny apiece--affordable even in Korogocho."

Elias said he hopes to test the prototype in other locations and expand the model to many parts of the world lacking water treatment systems.

COURTESY OF PATH

An electrochlorinator device made by Seattle-based Cascade Designs with the global health non-profit PATH as a cheap water purifier.

Another of the non-profit's milestones was helping distribute mosquito bednets to two-thirds of homes in Zambia. PATH expects to reach the whole population within the next two years, he said, making Zambia the first country in Africa to meet the global targets for malaria control.

As a result, malaria prevalence in children has gone down by more than half, and the number of children dying of malaria in Zambia has been cut by a third, Elias said.

Looking at health care from another angle, PATH Nicaragua country manager Margarita Quintanilla talked about programs for adolescent girls and boys aimed at reducing violence against women in a country where one out of three women is abused.

PATH also focuses on heavily on vaccines, such as a new meningitis vaccine for sub-Saharan Africa, where about 450 million people -- more than the populations of the U.S. and Canada -- are at risk from the disease each year.

The first wave of young people will get the vaccine by the end of this year, Elias said, adding "It's the beginning of the end for a disease that has devastated Africa's poorest communities for more than a century."

Where do swine flu, avian flu and potential influenza viruses of the future find a rich breeding ground? In the production sites of industrial agriculture, some disease experts say.

Industrial poultry and swine production can foster the mixing of flu viruses such as the new influenza A (H1N1) strain, commonly called swine flu, which has components of human, bird and pig viruses.

Disease experts are starting to see links between conditions in industrial food animal production and public health, but the risks are not well measured, said Dr. Ann Marie Kimball, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington's School of Public Health and a specialist in emerging diseases.

ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI / ASSOCIATED PRESS>

Pigs on a farm in Mexico's Veracruz state.

Kimball was among a panel of Seattle experts speaking at the University of Washington on swine flu Monday evening as part of the Washington Global Health Alliance Discovery series. TVW will televise the panel at 8 p.m. tomorrow.

Kimball said the globalization of travel, trade and extended chains of food production all represent risks for influenza as animals and people are transported across borders more than ever before.

She pointed out that people won't catch swine flu by eating pork or traveling on planes. With modern filtration systems in airplane cabins, people are unlikely to contract a virus through the air unless they're sitting next to a person coughing or sneezing.

Yet air transportation has played a central role in global transmission, since travelers exposed to viruses can carry them within hours to other countries.

Kimball said influenza surveillance may be missing the "sentinel populations" working close to animals, such as farmers, veterinarians and meat packers, particularly in places like Iowa where much of the country's pork is produced.

A report by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production found chronic overuse of antibiotics in animals and other problems with industrial farming has led to antibiotic resistance and become a threat to public health. More interesting commentary on that is here.

Commercial agriculture has experienced a boom in China, and most of it of takes place in urban areas, said Kimball, who directs the APEC Emerging Infections Network.

Just as avian influenza (H5N1) and SARS had connections to human contact with animals, reports in the Mexican press and elsewhere point to an influenza epicenter around a huge hog farm in Veracruz.

Around the world, global defenses are uneven, with poor and middle-income countries lacking enough resources to monitor and respond to a pandemic.

"You don't worry about countries reporting cases," she said. "You worry about countries that are very silent."

Seattle's global health expertise is being called upon to study the body's immune response to the swine flu virus.

Alan Aderem, co-founder and director of the Institute for Systems Biology, was tapped by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week to apply his current research to unlocking the mysteries of the H1N1 "swine flu" virus. Aderem had already received a $20 million NIH grant to study immune response to avian flu.

Aderem and a team of 25 ISB researchers are comparing the swine flu virus with the avian flu virus and the seasonal flu virus. They hope to determine not only how dangerous the current virus could be, but how to treat and prevent it.

The 1918 flu killed millions of people because it produced an overly active immune response. He'll examine proteins in the lung to determine whether the swine flu virus elicits a similar response. I had a conversation with Aderem about his project late Thursday.

JOHN LOK/SEATTLE TIMES

Alan Aderem, at work in his Seattle office, specializes in immunology and cell biology.

How did this come about?
Two days ago we had started moving in the direction of applying what we were doing in our big NIH grant to this problem. NIH called this morning and asked specifically to apply what we were doing to this flu, so it was both on our own initiative and NIH.. I won't say commanded but strongly supported us to do this.

How exactly do you study it?
Infect many mice with the virus and then take fluid from the lung. We measure proteins with a very sensitive mass spectrometer and essentially are able to quantify every one of the proteins in the lung. It's important because for a few immune proteins, the way they are secreted is the way the 1918 flu killed the host.

What makes this more serious than seasonal flu?
Usually diseases that are viral or any infectious diseases co-evolved with the host generally are relatively mild. Human flu co-evolved with humans is mild because it's not in the interest of the virus to kill the host. When viruses become very dangerous is when they jump from one species to another. That's why bird flu is so dangerous. Humans have not developed immunity.

Generally speaking bird flu cannot infect humans. There's protein on the surface of bird flu which allows flu to infect a cell that has a very specific protein in the receptor. Human flu has protein that recognizes the human receptor and allows human virus to enter the human cell. The bird virus has a different protein that can't enter humans. But if you have an intermediary like a pig, where human virus can infect it, and bird virus can infect it, when the virus reassembles in the cell, you have more than one type of flu in the cell. It can reassemble and the human gene can go to the bird and vice versa. Now the virus coming out has components of humans, allowing it to infect humans with the bird virus. This virus has some components from bird, some components from pig. Because of that it's a very dangerous. It can get into human cells, has dangerous components from other species and can spread to other humans.

Bird flu is clearly very dangerous. It produces a cytokine storm -- hormone molecules produced by immune cells used to signal other immune cells. If you produce too many, essentially an over exuberance in immune response, that causes severe damage.

What expertise can ISB bring to bear on this problem?
Our main focus is systems biology -- what that does is take global measurements. We measure all of the proteins. We measure all the genes, all the RNA and all the proteins then use very powerful computational tools to understand how the system works holistically.

There are complicated webs of information produced in immune cells when they interact with viruses. One thing we do very well is measure large numbers of proteins very accurately. Those two capacities allow us in this case to examine these immune cells in context of how they respond to flu. how they can compare to other flus and proteins in the lungs and their capacity to do damage.

The idea is they give us the opportunity to find better drug targets and generate more effective vaccines. Drug targets are particularly important because right now Tamiflul is the only drug that's working. One needs to find more targets.

Are people overreacting to this?
I think better safe than sorry. Maybe one day in hindsight people will say they might have been overreacting For right now, it's potentially dangerous, and it's worthwhile to respond with these kinds of measures. I don't think we are panicked from where I'm sitting. I live in Madrona and they closed Madrona Elementary. I think that is the right thing to do.

Why is the virus causing more deaths in Mexico than in the U.S.?
It isn't that it's a different virus, rather the health conditions are different. Other social factors are influencing the outcome of infection, such as if people live more closely or people are malnourished.

How quickly can you develop a vaccine?
I think we'll get results pretty quickly and deeper understanding quite quickly, but what one can do about it is another matter. It takes time to interpret and collate information. It's hard to say how long it will take. Vaccines are made in eggs. For 300 million dosage, right now that's 300 million eggs. That's a huge ship you've got to turn around to do that. This virus appears to grow very slowly in eggs. That of course also impedes vaccine development.

The heat is on, but FareStart is staying right in the kitchen.

The economic downturn has put pressure on the non-profit as more people are seeking its services, and even successful graduates are returning for help after being laid off, Executive Director Megan Karch said.

THOMAS JAMES HURST/SEATTLE TIMES

But she's not deterred.

"If ever there's a time we should be stepping up, it's now," Karch told supporters at a recent lunch.

For homeless and disadvantaged people, FareStart provides a wide range of services to help them turn their lives around: housing and food, case management, counseling, support, culinary and barista training and job placement. As a social business, it helps to fund its programs by operating a retail restaurant, cafe, catering services and meals for local childcare centers and shelters. It's also opening a second employee cafe at the Gates Foundation's current offices. Business revenue was about $2.5 million last year, a little less than half of its overall funding, Karch said.

At mid-day on a Wednesday, FareStart's downtown restaurant was bustling with customers. The trouble is, other restaurants are so not bustling any more, especially those at the high end. Many of them provide jobs and services for FareStart students.

In a good economy, FareStart found jobs for 95 percent of its graduates within 90 days. That's a lot harder to do in a recession. It's taking longer, and the job placement rate has dropped to 80 percent, Karch said.

Last year 600 people came in for FareStart services. About half of them entered the 16-week training program and about 200 finished.

This year, enrollment is at record highs. Adding to that, more graduates are coming back and asking for help, "worried they will spiral back down" into homelessness, substance abuse and other problems, Karch said. With more people on the street, FareStart is also seeing an influx of all kinds of people looking for services, not necessarily fitting the group's core mission of culinary training.

Sometimes they're just looking for a place to stay.

FareStart depends on other non-profit partners to provide services to students. Many of them, especially mental health and substance abuse programs, have taken the hardest financial hit. "It's a biggie for us," Karch said, "how to serve students with less ability of partners to help."

FareStart set up a job club and put more resources into job placement efforts. It's still finding openings for graduates in assisted living, hotels and cruise lines. Its largest expense is paying housing costs of $400 to $700 a month for each student while in training.

When Karch presented the FareStart board her budget for 2009, it was the first time in her nine years with the organization that she proposed running a deficit. The non-profit has been in a good financial position, and now's the time to stay true to its promises, she said.

FareStart's five-year vision is to expand current services to help move students into living wage jobs with health insurance, permanent housing and self sufficiency. Nationally, FareStart hopes to create a network for similar programs (such as Inspiration Cafe in Chicago) to share ideas and best practices.

The malaria eradication efforts of Seattle-based PATH are moving ahead today with the first human trials of one of its vaccine candidates -- a "whole parasite" vaccine made by Sanaria.

MIKE SIEGEL/SEATTLE TIMES

PATH's Malaria Vaccine Initiative, a global nonprofit consortium supported by about $450 million in grants from the Gates Foundation, is working with drug companies such as Sanaria to advance studies on various vaccine candidates.

"Initiation of this trial expands the spectrum of malaria vaccines in clinical development today," said MVI Director Christian Loucq. Conducting early trials with volunteers allows scientists to weed out vaccines that don't work and accelerate those that do, he said.

The PfSPZ vaccine is made in Sanaria's Maryland lab from P. falciparum parasites harvested by hand from the salivary glands of infected mosquitoes.

This trial will assess the vaccine's safety and efficacy by vaccinating more than 100 volunteers and then allowing malaria-infected mosquitoes to bite them, testing whether the vaccine offers protection. Malaria kills nearly a million people a year, mostly small children in Africa.

Another malaria vaccine supported by PATH, RTS,S developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), is the most advanced, beginning its final phase of clinical trials this year in Africa.

Sanaria founder and CEO Stephen L. Hoffman was part of a team of military doctors trying to develop a malaria vaccine in the 1980s at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There he worked with W. Ripley Ballou, who now heads malaria vaccine research for GSK.

Ballou's RTS,S malaria vaccine has proved effective in adults and children, reducing the risk of infection by about 35 percent. But Hoffman said that level of protection is too low.

"That's not a vaccine that could ever be considered for use in the developed world," he told Scientific American in an interview last year.

In the 1990s, Hoffman exposed himself to bites of 3,000 mosquitoes -- irradiated to weaken the malaria parasites they were carrying -- to infect himself with malaria, eventually becoming immune from the disease.

That early experiment formed the basis of Sanaria's approach, which is unique in deploying a weakened form of the whole malaria parasite harvested from the saliva of irradiated mosquitoes instead of using small portions of the parasite.

While the challenges associated with a vaccine based on live parasites had been widely viewed as insurmountable, Sanaria says it has developed new technologies and manufacturing capability.

The trials will be conducted by researchers at two sites in Maryland: the US Naval Medical Research Center in Bethesda and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Scientists from Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI), meanwhile, are working on a vaccine that uses genetic engineering to render malaria parasites harmless. SBRI is preparing its first vaccine candidate to enter clinical trials at Walter Reed this year. SBRI, which as about 100 researchers dedicated exclusively to malaria, will also open its own Malaria Clinical Trials Research Center later this year at its South Lake Union lab, where volunteers are paid to get bitten.

On Wednesday, I'm planning to interview Kiva.org CEO and co-founder Matt Flannery.
If anyone has a question for him, please send it to me or post in the comments and I'll try to include it.

When I first wrote about Kiva in 2006, it had just completed 116 loans. Today it has helped fund 88,869 loans for a total of $62 million. No wonder Flannery thinks about the potential for individual lending to challenge the traditional banking model.

GARY REYES/SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

Matt Flannery (right) co-founder of Kiva.org, with company President Premal Shah (left) in San Francisco.

In fact, one microlending site backed by eBay offers better rates than banks. Even though Kiva does not offer interest to lenders, last year it had a rare problem in the non-profit world: too many people willing to help. Kiva had many more lenders than borrowers.

Flannery writes about his experience as a social entrepreneur here, including trying to understand the implications of a rapidly morphing global financial crisis on his business. I'm curious about the potential for expansion of Kiva to U.S. borrowers and to small or medium-sized enterprises.

Flannery is coming to Town Hall on Thursday to discuss microcredit as a means of poverty eradication, how technology helps that process, and Kiva's plans for the future.

Arriving like a well-timed tonic on the heels of "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Creative Capitalism," entrepreneurs came to Seattle with ideas for how to improve life in those same Mumbai slums and prove that socially motivated business can work.

Sreejith N G and his team from NMIMS are creating 10 cent meals for poor slum dwellers using vegetable peels from nearby hotels, along with rice, beans and sugarcane, in disposable foil packets.

Bright Simons and Kofi Boateng aim to solve the growing problem of counterfeit medicine by developing a consumer protection grid that links an authentication system with SMS text messaging, called West Africa Consumer Protection Grid or WAPGrid.

Kat Wickersham and her team aims to build a girls school in Rwanda, with a for-profit project attached to fund the school and train girls in native arts, selling traditional paintings made of cow dung.

PAUL GIBSON/FOSTER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

MBA student Kat Wickersham (left) talks with Claudine Zongo, Hubert Humphrey Fellow in the UW School of Public Affairs.

They're among 14 teams of business students pitching creative and commercially sustainable ways to address problems of poverty in developing countries. They're competing for $20,000 in prize money in the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition, now in its fifth year at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. The full list of projects is here.

The grand prize is $10,000, the global health first prize is $5,000, global health second prize is $2,500, and the Investor's Choice Award is $2,500. Winners will be announced at tonight's awards banquet.

UPDATE: And the winners are...

Grand Prize ($10,000): Aahar: Meals for Poor at 10 Cents
Global Health Grand Prize ($5,000): Solar Cycle (simple solar ovens made from local waste materials, a project of Brown University)
Global Health Second Prize ($2,500): WAPGrid
Investor's Choice Award ($2,500): WAPGrid

Since most of these teams don't have a Web site of their own, here's my suggestion for next year -- they each get a GSEC page to describe themselves and their project.

Chris Meyer, a GSEC finalist I had a chance to meet in 2007, created Planting Empowerment, which is still going strong and maintains 50 acres of timber plantations in Panama, where it operates sustainable forestry.

"People are very committed to doing good and helping people and thinking about problems in creative ways," said Josh Herst, a Seattle entrepreneur who is one of this year's judges.

His approach to evaluating social businesses is "exactly the same as a startup," said Herst, who founded TripHub and worked at Expedia and Madrona Venture Group. "The people involved, their passion and commitment, familiarity with their business, and opportunities that can be leveraged and scaled in broad and interesting ways."

As he thinks about new ventures to pursue, Herst has taken an interest in social business: "I'm attracted to the commitment, energy and passion of finding ways to make a positive impact on the world," he said.

Can it work? "I believe so," he said, "but that's what I'm learning about."

Michael Kinsley has produced a thoughtful 310-page book about "Creative Capitalism," but he's not entirely convinced it's the answer. In fact he comes down about 51 percent against it.

As the former Slate editor and political columnist discussed the book Tuesday over lunch with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, he was hard pressed to say exactly how the concept could apply to small business or global health non-profits working with the private sector. The book has 43 contributors, each with a different viewpoint, making for a rich debate. But only two names in bold letters appear on the cover, a point of dispute between Kinsley and the publisher.

Kinsley sat down to answer some questions about the book between bites of chocolate cheesecake.

Q: Can you give a quick definition of creative capitalism?

A: It's not my term, it's Bill Gates' term, but I would say it is the use of capitalism and capitalist techniques in areas that traditionally are left to government and philanthropy.

MIKE SIEGEL/SEATTLE TIMES

Is it just me or does Michael Kinsley look like Stephen Colbert with facial hair?

Q: What has Bill Gates' reaction been to the book?

A: We had this embarrassing cover and because of that I really have not heard from him to see what his reaction is. We had an agreement with Simon & Schuster that they wouldn't exaggerate the role of Bill and Warren [Buffett]. They are two contributors among many. This is actually a compromise. Basically I don't like the cover and I don't even know what Bill and Warren think. If they're annoyed, I don't blame them.

Q: What effect has the economic downturn had on the potential for creative capitalism?

A: It's clearly reduced because corporations are more attentive to their own bottom lines.

Q: In another way you could argue it's made it more urgent.

A: Yes, and that's what I do. The problems it's supposed to address are more urgent. But also the incentive to address them has been reduced, so who knows how those two factors balance out?

Q: Sum up the best arguments for and against...

A: The best argument against is the basic one that companies should take care of their stockholders and if there are social problems that's the job of government.

The best argument for is: for goodness' sake, capitalism has been such a force. If there are problems in the world and there are ways capitalism can address them, why would you be against that?

Q: Where do you come down in your own assessment?

A: About 51 percent con. It's basically because I'm a terrific admirer of what Bill Gates actually did, and I would be slightly afraid we might not have had that if he had been concentrating on the social thing.

Q: If governments were working well and markets were fair and efficient, would creative capitalism even be necessary?

A: It depends on how far you think we are from that ideal and whether you would agree with anybody else about what is fair. It's mainly conservatives who said 'I thought capitalism by its nature was creative.' So they say 'why do we need to reinvent it?'

A lot of people were so complacent back in the '80s and '90s (the tax system among others) and, if they're having second thoughts right now, that's good. Now it's almost too easy because we need the stimulus. We've got to shovel this money out the door, and I'm sure there's a lot of wasteful stuff going on that we'll discover in a few years.

Q: Are there any real results or examples where this idea has worked (besides maybe the Grameen Bank)?

A: The ONE campaign. Bill says what he has in mind is not so much corporate charity, but corporations doing what they do, only in ways that help people who need it. For example, Microsoft giving away software and training people how to use it would be creative capitalism to him. Target gives away some percent of its profits -- in Minneapolis I guess it's really part of the culture. God, if you were watching the Oscars on Sunday I was struck by the ads... every corporation in America is doing wonderful things and nothing to do with their core business.

Q: Has this book changed anything you're doing or are you just a neutral observer?

A: I'm pretty neutral. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that Bill Gates is an excellent role model, and following his example might be a better idea than following his suggestion.

Q: Tell me about your next project...

A: I have this idea of trying to update Studs Terkel. We would gather stuff on the Internet, open it up for anyone to go and write their stories. It's about what's happening now -- getting laid off -- all the awful ways people get laid off and the good (or more humane) ways they get laid off.

During a long day of discussions on the energy and the environment involving the world's top two consumers and polluters, one of the most startling facts was a look at where greenhouse gases are increasing fastest.

Over the past decade, carbon dioxide output increased about 1 percent in the United States and 4.7 percent in China but 12.7 percent in Indonesia, according to McKinsey & Co., which is researching the potential of various technologies to reduce carbon, and weighing them against cost. Measured in gigatons of CO2 per year, the U.S. now produces about 7.2, while China produces 6.8 and Indonesia 3.1.

MERCY CORPS

Women operating small food stalls use new clean burning stoves in a program being tested in a Jakarta slum.

Two local efforts address climate change in emerging markets by linking them with carbon credits, trying to reach the millions for whom survival means burning coal, slashing forests and breathing toxic indoor air.

In Indonesia Mercy Corps is using private seed capital (much of it from Seattle) to fund a program to manufacture new cooking stoves and replace kerosene with compressed bricks made from plant matter. The program aims to offer the stove buyers an immediate financial reward for reducing their carbon emissions. That's a whole story in itself, related to the purchase of a commercial bank, which I'll write about later.

MERCY CORPS

New stoves are made to burn vegetable pellets, cheaper and less polluting than kerosene.

MicroEnergy Credits is a Seattle-based effort to use microfinance as a way to pay the upfront costs of purchasing simple clean-energy systems, such as stoves, solar panels and biogas digesters. Through carbon credits, microfinance institutions earn revenue when they lend money for such systems that create verified carbon emissions reductions.

MicroEnergy Credits Director James Dailey, a Peace Corps veteran, previously worked for the Grameen Technology Center, where he led development of the Mifos open source software project. Co-founder April Allderdice is a veteran of Grameen Shakti and McKinsey.

The World Bank's Carbon Finance Unit is testing the waters with agreements to buy the carbon credits associated with greenhouse gas reductions in Bangladesh.

With carbon cap and trade programs, measurement and verification remain key questions. Nevertheless, the work of small start-ups and non-profits is important to addressing the energy problem, and a resource that big government and business pow-wows haven't given adequate attention. By making clean energy part of building small enterprises from the ground up, the hope is that poor countries can grow economies without the heavy toll on the environment that richer ones have already taken.

Twestival is a hybrid online / in-person event taking place in 175 cities around the world today, including one in Seattle tonight at Spitfire.

It's an experiment in using social media to advance charitable giving. The beneficiary is New York based charity:water, which builds wells to provide clean drinking water in developing countries.

Supporters are using microblogging tool Twitter to spread the word. This site makes it possible to watch live feeds from any of the locations.

Organizers are using Twitter to nudge companies and Seattle's tech elite to contribute to the cause, sending messages to their Twitter accounts which are posted publicly.

But the Seattle tweets recently show that even a cutting-edge fundraising method is encountering a challenging local economy.

"I wish @waggeneredstrom had decided to sponsor Twestival Seattle. I guess times are tough. Hope they help out the PDX event," organizers wrote Tuesday.

"I'm Close to giving up on local corp. sponsors for Twestival Seattle. Everyone business appears to be in budget / risk lockdown. So sad."

Think Kindle is exciting? Take a look at this book that talks, was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10.

Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge launched its pilot program today to test dozens of its Talking Books in Ghana. The digital audio player and recorder is designed as a tool to teach literacy when used with textbooks, and help rural people who can't read get access to information.

In the current usability test, Literacy Bridge volunteers want to find out how people use the device and what content is most popular. They are working with local health and agricultural officials to help disseminate information, such as disease prevention and best farming practices, and with local schools to build lesson plans using the device.

The man behind the project is Cliff Schmidt, a former Microsoft program manager who studied artificial intelligence and thought a lot about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. He left Microsoft to form Literacy Bridge.

In a place like Ghana, Schmidt thinks having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. He also designed a function for users to record their own messages, and a way for such content to be distributed within local networks through the device-to-device copying capability.

Next he hopes to use the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could be used anywhere in the world.

Here's a detailed Q&A with Schmidt, and a profile of Literacy Bridge.

The great Gates vacuum keeps pulling them in from points far and wide, with news today that the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Elias Zerhouni, is now a senior fellow at the Gates Foundation. NIH is the country's largest funder of biomedical research.

Zerhouni served under the Bush Administration from his appointment in 2002 until he left in October. There he helped "enhance synergy between all 27 NIH institutes and centers and fund compelling research initiatives of potential high impact," says the Gates Foundation. In 2006 Congress institutionalized many of his reforms.

Zerhouni also became controversial for banning NIH scientists from consulting with drug and medical device makers, and during his tenure, the NIH budgets stagnated. The New England Journal of Medicine noted that funding doubled between 1998 and 2003, but flattened afterward. In 2007 the budget was the first real reduction in NIH support since 1970.

Born in Algeria, Zerhouni came to the United States at age 24 with a medical degree from the University of Algiers School of Medicine and finished his training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he worked as chair of Radiology Department, vice dean for research and executive vice dean.

Besides being a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, he will serve on the board of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

His task now is to "spur innovative solutions" as he advises the foundation on its global health programs, particularly the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.

For more innovative solutions, maybe they should just hire this company.

Grim financial news has made raising capital almost anywhere a challenge. But a relatively new kind of investment with a social payoff is expanding this year -- vaccine bonds.

The bonds offer retail investors a fixed rate of return along with the opportunity to use their money to help immunize children in poor countries.

The bonds are offered by the International Finance Facility for Immunisation Co., (IFFIm) a UK-based charity and subsidiary of the GAVI Alliance, a global partnership to expand vaccines that was one of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's first major health initiatives.

Since introducing the bonds first to institutional investors in 2006, GAVI has raised about $1 billion. The organization seeks to raise an additional $500 million this year, beginning next month when the bonds go on sale to retail investors in Japan. Based on their success so far, they may be offered in other markets in the future, says Gargee Ghosh, senior program officer for development finance at the Gates Foundation.

JACQUELINE M. KOCH

Researchers are closing in on a successful vaccine against malaria in Mozambique, .

They're backed by long-term government aid commitments over one or two decades from donors such as the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Spain and other countries. Based on those pledges, the IFFIm board issues bonds as needed. The donor countries make annual payments toward their commitments, covering the interest on the bonds.

"What this essentially does is create predictable on-call funding for vaccines," says Ghosh.

The previous bond, issued in March 2008 to Japanese institutional investors, pays 9.9 percent a year with a two-year maturity. This year's bond, arranged by Daiwa Securities SMBC, pays 6.6 percent interest over three years.

Their triple-A rating makes the bonds solid enough to appeal to the gun-shy, Ghosh says.

"IFFIm has really tapped a market we thought but weren't sure existed," she said. "People talk so much about social investing. This is such a great example. It's a completely viable financial structure. People don't need to care about kids in Africa at all for this to make sense in a portfolio. But if they do, they can track the impact of their funds."

(The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently questioned some countries' reporting methods, which may influence the way GAVI measures progress.)

GAVI uses the funds for big upfront investments such as buying trucks and stockpiling polio vaccines. In the future it may call upon bonds to help finance a malaria vaccine.

The innovative financing is creating a new kind of asset class, one that could work for other kinds of investments supporting humanitarian projects. It could also attract socially motivated investors in the U.S.

"We've just scratched the surface of understanding the social investment market," she said. "The U.S. is a deep market we just haven't really tapped."