A new website connects lawyers who want to volunteer time with non profits and social entrepreneurs looking for free legal services.

TrustLaw Connect is an online service promoting pro bono legal work around the world. It works a bit like Kiva in that people requesting and people donating help are vetted and then matched through the service, which is run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. It's free to both beneficiaries and providers.

More than 60 law firms and 80 non profits have signed up, including Seattle-based Teachers Without Borders. For social entrepreneurs, however, the service doesn't accept unsolicited proposals. Instead it works by referral from organizations such as Ashoka, the Grameen Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Skoll Foundation.

Examples of the kind of work it supports are writing legal documents, advice on intellectual property, governance, drafting funding agreements, negotiating contracts and advice on charity laws. Lawyers Without Borders offers a similar service.

TrustLaw says it doesn't help with litigation against individuals, companies or governments, which may limit its impact. Still at a time when nonprofit resources are constrained, getting professional services donated could save valuable funds for programs.

The foundation said its overall aim is to improve access to the rule of law and greater transparency. The site is also devoted to news and information about anti-corruption activities around the world.

Is Microsoft an incubator for social entrepreneurship?

Over the years, plenty of people have retired from the company to start a second career in philanthropy or to create new enterprises that address social issues.

Microsoft alumni have founded and supported more than 150 non-profit organizations and social ventures working around the world, according to its alumni foundation.

Employee giving and company matching funds totaled almost $90 million last year (employee charitable donations and volunteer time are matched up to $12,000 a year).

Such support has moved well beyond a fringe benefit. To attract the next generation of employees, making a social mission part of the company's DNA has become a vital recruiting tool, said Lisa Brummel, senior vice president for human resources. (She's seated at far left with four employees active in philanthropy)

It's also something she sees as an advantage over competitors.

"There are certain companies that give their employees 20 percent time to spend internally to make the company better," she said, referring to Google. "And there are some companies that give their employees 20 percent time externally to make the world better."

Brummel spoke last week at a first ever Microsoft Accelerator Summit, a round table discussion with media and non-profits focused entirely on corporate citizenship. The participants ranged from an employee of less than two years to CEO Steve Ballmer.

"If you go to employees and say why do you work here.. at the end of the day people buy in and participate in their own mind in our vision and they want to make a difference in society," Ballmer said.

Employees are running non-profits of their own, including the Jolkona Foundation, Givology and CRY America. Xiang Li, a Microsoft product manager and co-founder of education non-profit Givology, said the prospect of making a difference is more important to her than a higher salary.

"The amount of effort I see our employees doing is quite remarkable," Ballmer said. "We want to make sure we enable and support and encourage that."

In fact, the new organizational model that a younger, globally connected workforce demands is one that blends social and commercial goals, and attracts talent with visionary leadership and social mission, Seattle author Rob Salkowitz writes in his book "Young World Rising."

One of the key questions for any company, though, is how to align doing well for society with its business goals.

For Microsoft, areas where the two converge include health, science, education, workforce training and bridging the digital divide, Ballmer said.

In a project called PhotoDNA, for example, Microsoft researchers teamed up with Dartmouth College computer science professor Hany Farid to create a way to identify and filter out known images of child pornography from search engines, based on matching their digital fingerprints provided by law enforcement agencies.

Another project involved deploying 200 sensors throughout the Brazilian rainforest to measure temperature, water vapor and solar radiation, collecting data and designing systems to visualize the effects of climate change.

The Web site Microsoft Hohm helps people calculate their energy use and find ways to conserve, and it's planned in the future as a tool to help manage information about when and where to recharge electric vehicles.

The company's legacy of philanthropy took inspiration from Mary Gates, the mother of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and a leader of United Way. "It spread starting from Bill and his family to the company and it sort of became part of our culture," said Pamela Passman, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel (pictured above).

This year, the company ranked 14 on a list of the 100 best corporate citizens by Corporate Responsibility magazine, which evaluated performance on a range of issues such as environment, climate change, employee relations, human rights and philanthropy. Despite the generally favorable review, CR gave Microsoft a cautionary "yellow card" for its involvement in antitrust cases brought by the European Union and U.S. state governments.

Tim Cranton, associate general counsel who worked on the PhotoDNA project, described what he finds unique about the company's culture.

"Microsoft employees truly believe they can change the world with software, even sometimes in an arrogant way, but there is an abiding belief that we can change the world."

I wanted to understand what Ballmer thinks about the legacy of philanthropy in the company and what he plans to do with his own wealth.

"I don't start with what are we giving away but what are we trying to accomplish and what can we get done," he said.

Partnerships with NGOs around the world are key to that strategy, and they include groups such as NetHope, CARE, TechSoup and Goodwill Industries.

On the question of his own philanthropy, Ballmer said he wants to be anonymous and private. "My own world's my own world, so I continue to treat it that way," he said.

While he supports the kind of giving Microsoft is doing, he sounded more pragmatic than visionary. "If you stack it up next to the world's problems, it's got to be money that ignites action."

So what impact are these efforts having on business and society?

For one thing, by investing in IT training programs for unskilled workers, the company gets a lot more feedback about how its products can be improved, said Akhtar Badshah, senior director of global community affairs.

Microsoft is investing significant resources in a program called Unlimited Potential, which combines technology, education and economic development to improve conditions for the billions of people at the middle and bottom of the global economy.

Like many high-tech heavyweights, the company is providing resources to seed its next markets.

"There is no guarantee that that any one high-tech company will benefit in a direct way," Salkowitz writes. Their investments could end up developing fertile markets for their competitors, but it's not worth the risk of standing by while others gain a foothold, he contends. Either way, the beneficiaries are local consumers, businesses and entrepreneurs.

Nalini Gangadharan, chair of the CAP Foundation, said IT training programs funded by corporate partners have helped raise the marriage age in parts of India where more than half of girls traditionally get married before the age of 15.

"Before, girls were sitting idle and married off," she said. "Today the girls are saying as long as it's safe and secure, they are able to hold jobs and have decision-making status in the family. That is one of best outcomes."

An equity fund focused on poverty? Sounds odd, I know. But Chris Brookfield, who managed funds for Unitus, and his partners at Elevar said today they have raised $70 million to invest in companies providing services to people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Elevar told me a bit about the fund last June.

Seattle-based Elevar will invest in companies involved in microfinance and other services targeted at the working poor in countries such as India, Mexico, the Philippines and Peru.

KEN LAMBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

Chris Brookfield, left, then Unitus Equity Fund's investment director, with Veena Mankar, director of Swadhaar FinAccess, at a 2007 reception in Seattle.

Elevar is the second fund of Unitus Equity Fund, initially run as a for-profit arm of Unitus, a Seattle-based non-profit organization. Elevar is now independent of Unitus, though it remains a strategic partner, Brookfield said.

Besides microfinance, Brookfield said Elevar will also seek to invest in financing low income housing, agriculture and information services. The idea is to bring more commercial capital into development.

Improving incomes of billions of poor people -- the so-called "Next 4 Billion" -- has benefits for companies here, too. Economic growth in developing countries "is the strongest opportunity for long-term business growth," according to this report by the IGD, since the poorest two-thirds of the world's population represent $5 trillion in purchasing power. The more development can be supported through investment, the less dependent countries will be on foreign aid. The majority of poor countries don't attract much private investment, so it will be interesting to see whether a socially motivated fund can create a path for it.

"Our strategy is to challenge discrimination and democratize the distribution of opportunity by investing in companies providing high volume, low cost services to the poor and their communities," Sandeep Farias, managing director at Elevar, said in a statement.

The anchors of the new fund are Legatum and Omidyar Network.

Elevar's portfolio includes microfinance institutions SKS Microfinance, Ujjivan, Grama Vidiyal, Madura Microfinance and Swadhaar in India; Grupo Crediexpress in Mexico and FINSOL in Brazil.

Elevar has also invested two non-financial services companies in India: Moksha Yug Access, which builds trading infrastructure and market links between rural communities and larger commercial markets, and Comat Technologies, which provides Internet connectivity in rural areas for government services and education.

This year's Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Washington had so many promising business plans that picking just two winners proved difficult. So judges did something unusual: they ponied up their own money on the spot to award another $3,000 prize.

The contest, which had 161 entries from 36 countries this year, combines business, non-profit and academic work to encourage creative solutions to global poverty.

The top winning team taking home $10,000 was Nuru Light -- Charles Ishimwe from Adventist University of Central Africa and Max Fraden of the University of Massachusetts Medical School -- who also won the GSEC People's Choice Award and Investor's Choice Award. The team created a clean and affordable alternative to kerosene as a light source in Rwanda. The portable, rechargeable lights are the size and shape of a tape measure and the charger is a portable box with a bicycle-style pedal.

The UW Global Health prize of $5,000 went to ToucHb, a non-invasive finger scanner that measures hemoglobin levels to diagnose anemia. It can be used by low-skilled village health workers in rural India and eliminates the fear and infection risks associated with a needle prick. The team is made up of two doctors from the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences -- Yogesh Patil and Abhishek Sen.

The spontaneous Judges' Choice award of $3,000 went to Malo Traders for their plan to help small-scale rice farmers in Mali earn a better living by providing storage, marketing and other post-harvest services. Team Malo is two brothers who grew up in Africa and are now studying in the U.S. -- Mohamed Ali Niang, a business student at Temple University, and Salif Romano Niang, PhD student in political science at Purdue.

On Friday, the projects were on display at a breakfast hosted by the Seattle International Foundation, where students with ideas talked to executives with funds and experience.

ToucHb got tested by PATH CEO Chris Elias, while Microsoft veterans Rob Short and Will Poole wanted details about Nuru Light's business plan. Check out the video above with winners introducing their projects.

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."

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.

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.

Brigit Helms, a Seattle native described as a development and microfinance expert with a risk-taking spirit, will join local non-profit Unitus as its new chief executive officer.

ANDREW HELMS

New Unitus CEO Brigit Helms is a Seattle native returning home from working in Indonesia.

Helms worked previously at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank, in Jakarta, where she was responsible for developing a five-year strategy involving $15 billion in investments. Before that she spent 10 years working at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP).

She said the field of microfinance faces some of its greatest challenges and opportunities right now.

"The challenge now is to explosively scale and increase access to the millions in need," Helms said. Bold and creative microfinance organizations need to take risks to help make financial services accessible to the large numbers of people still living in poverty, she added.

She joins Ed Bland, who is Unitus' president and chief operating officer. Unitus had been operating without a CEO since the departure of Geoff Davis last year.

Helms has a Ph.D. in Development and Agricultural Economics from Stanford University and master's degrees from Stanford and Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

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.

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and co-author of the book Half the Sky, said the inhuman reality many girls face in the world became crystal clear when he purchased two girls from a brothel in Cambodia for about $200 each, and was given receipts.

"It's no exaggeration to talk about this as truly slavery," he said, speaking to the World Affairs Council tonight at Town Hall.

At the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, about 80,000 people were sold. Today there are 800,000 women and girls being trafficked around the world, he said.

Anywhere from 60 million to 100 million girls have disappeared from the world's population because of female infanticide and inadequate care for girls' health, Kristof said, showing photos of a skeletal child being treated in a feeding center, whose brothers were well fed and healthy.

"Every kid in the feeding center was a girl," Kristof said.

But he argued that even small interventions can transform the situation, and education is the best place to focus resources.

The U.S. has spent $11 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11, money which has accomplished "next to nothing," he said. If some of it had gone to education, the impact would be felt by now.

Bangladesh, by contrast, invested in girls education after it split off from Pakistan. Now there are more girls in school than boys, the country is doing relatively well and tackling its remaining problems with home grown solutions such as microcredit.

Supporting local grassroots movements for female education and economic opportunity is one way Americans can encourage change without forcing their cultural values on others, he said.

He finds the rise of social entrepreneurs a revolution that will change the world.

People want to engage in causes larger than themselves because it makes them happy, he said. Asked how he remains hopeful in the face of so much suffering, Kristof said it's because he witnesses so many selfless acts by people working in terrible conditions to save lives.

But when he comes back and sees "people who express their humanity by buying the latest car or having the latest iPod -- that is truly depressing," he said.

He advised young people to travel abroad, go outside their comfort zone, be embedded in the home of a local family.

Some people ask him why we should care about the fate of people in other countries many miles away.

"When you actually see a girl in a Cambodian brothel with her eye gouged out you don't ask that question."

What happened to the girls he bought out of slavery five years ago? Kristoff said he stayed in touch and still visits them. One is married to a good husband who doesn't know her past. The other went back to the brothel temporarily to feed her meth addiction, and later married a police officer. But now the brothel no longer exists. U.S. government pressure on Cambodia to crack down on trafficking made it risky and expensive, so the proprietor turned it into a grocery store.

Begging is a way of life for many women and girls in Africa. Carol Schillios wants to turn them into businesswomen.

Her Fabric of Life store in Edmonds is part of a non-profit that trains young women and girls in Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. The shop, run entirely by volunteers, then sells the products made by the women -- woven fabrics with traditional patterns, bags and multicolored beaded jewelry.

Schillios funds a school called the Here je Center in Mali's capital that teaches job skills, along with health and nutrition, family planning, AIDS prevention and literacy. The students are paid $20 a week to help support their families while they are studying.

The idea is to reach girls who are begging and get them off the streets before they turn to prostitution. They continue being paid that stipend as artisans after graduation. On an annual basis, it's more than double the average income for a person in Mali.

Schillios decided to focus on Mali after working there as a consultant and meeting Kaaba Soumare, the CEO of a small microfinance institution, who eventually became her local partner.

The shop provides a critical link -- market access to American buyers.

"We're always going to be consumers," but there's a difference she said, holding up a mustard colored place mat. "When you eat on it you know you helped save someone from starving."

A consultant to credit unions and microfinance groups, Schillios says she takes no salary from her non-profit, the Schillios Development Foundation, and relies on volunteers rather than employees.

For the past three months Schillios, 56, has been living in a tent on the roof above her shop, accompanied by her 22-year-old cat Elliette.

She vowed not to come down until 1 million people each donated $1 to her foundation and shared how they are making a difference in the world. So far she's raised $66,000.

The blue tarp covered tent is visible from along Main Street in downtown Edmonds, where she gets stares, waves and donations of coffee and food. Extension cords linked to the shop bring electricity for her laptop, lights and a device that helps her breathe at night. There are bottles of Ibuprofen for achy joints. She's hung a Tibetan prayer flag and a Halloween skeleton for decoration.

One night everything went wrong. The tent leaked. The roof of the makeshift bathroom collapsed in on her. She was so frustrated she took off her clothes and danced on the roof in the rain at 3 a.m.

Eventually she realized her goal of raising $1 million might be too ambitious, so she plans to come down before Christmas. Still she's happy with all the attention drawn to the cause.

One supporter agreed to match donations up to $43,000, $1 dollar for every resident of Edmonds.

Revenue from the Fabric of Life shop has steadily grown since its opening last November, enabling Schillios to channel about $30,000 into grants to the school in Bamako. About 20 women have graduated so far. Not all of them make it-- one of the students died of malaria a few weeks ago.

"We didn't find out the extent of her illness until it was too late," Schillios said. Two others left the program after they became pregnant. Still, she is hopeful she can fund a third class of students this year.

"My dream is we create an industry for the whole country," she said.

Seattle is building a reputation for using business to serve humanity. That kind of work used to be called "giving back." But for many young entrepreneurs, it's essential to their careers from the beginning.

Last year Nandie Oosthuizen, 19, founded Hand & Heart, a non-profit that funds an orphanage for kids affected by AIDS in her native South Africa. Before that she started a campaign at Bishop Blanchet High School to raise money and awareness about the crisis in Darfur. Now studying business and sociology at the University of Washington, she calls herself a change maker, social entrepreneur and youth philanthropist.

Oosthuizen is one of dozens of young entrepreneurs supported by Youth Venture, an organization that encourages people as young as 12 to use their creativity and passion to take on important social issues.

Since its start in Seattle in late 2007, Youth Venture Seattle has helped more than 30 student teams get up and running, some for more than a year now. They have each created projects around solving some kind of problem, from lack of clean water to sex trafficking to a community center focused on science and technology. Started by Ashoka, the global network for social entrepreneurs, Youth Venture helps the teams form a business plan, raise seed funds and launch their own enterprise.

COURTESY OF YOUTH VENTURE

Members of a group called American Youth for Equal Educational Opportunities in Bellevue collect school supplies for needy students with the help of Youth Venture.

Both Hand & Heart and Youth Venture will be represented tomorrow evening, along with the Vittana and Jolkona foundations, at a forum on social entrepreneurship sponsored by the World Affairs Council's Young Professionals International Network (YPIN). The forum starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Auditorium in the Seattle Central Library.

Participants, including Jolkona co-founders Adnan Mahmud and Nadia Eleza Khawaja and Vittana co-founder and CEO Kushal Chakrabarti, will share stories about what inspired them, the challenges they have faced and advice for others interested in starting a social enterprise.

Says Jack Knellinger, director of Youth Venture in Seattle:
"Having a room full of young people share their experiences and what they see in the world in terms of what they want to accomplish... opens up the minds of all of our youth."

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.

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.

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.

Can Vittana prove there is a viable commercial market for educational loans outside the U.S.? Amazon.com veterans are betting it can.

The Vittana Foundation is a fledgling non-profit that aims to bring student loans to developing countries through person-to-person micro-lending.

While microcredit has made great strides, says Vittana CEO Kushal Chakrabarti, it hasn't lifted poor entrepreneurs into the middle class. That's usually left to the next generation, so the first chance borrowers get, they send their kids to school. He wants to make that step easier.

KRISTI HEIM

Kim Rachmeler (left) is a former Amazon.com executive who now advises and invests in the educational non-profit Vittana, started by Kushal Chakrabarti (right) and Brett Witt. .

Making small loans to poor entrepreneurs has been so successful (at least financially) that it has spawned microfinance institutions around the world and investment by commercial banks such as Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

Student loans, however, are not common outside the U.S. and Europe.

"There isn't capital flowing in because the model isn't being proven, and the model isn't being proven because capital isn't flowing in," said Chakrabarti, 26, a former Amazon.com engineer.

He and fellow Amazon.com veteran Brett Witt are hoping to use Vittana to show that loaning money to students in developing countries for education is a good investment.

And their former colleagues and managers are backing them.

Kim Rachmeler spent 10 years at Amazon.com as a vice president and senior executive responsible for everything from worldwide customer service to global supply chains.

She has been a big supporter of sites such as DonorsChoose and Kiva. With Vittana she saw a chance to get involved early on as a major backer.

Rachmeler joined Amazon when it had only 500 employees, building the company and striving to prove the online retail model.

Back then "everything we did was betting the company," she said.

After retiring from Amazon.com two years ago, she said "I don't have that shot of adrenaline every day," but backing a non-profit technology venture with big ambitions, "I get to experience a little bit of that again. It's an opportunity to make the world a better place."

The challenge is helping Vittana grow big enough to be self sustaining during the worst recession anyone has experienced.

Former Amazon executive Joel Spiegel is also supporting Vittana, along with his wife, daughter and son, who is one of the non-profit's seven volunteers.

In an art gallery near South Lake Union, several dozen people gathered recently to listen to Chakrabarti pitch the Vittana concept in an effort to raise more funds.

He tells them the story of a student in Peru putting himself through law school by working a year, then studying a year, then working another year to save tuition.

"People find amazing ways of scraping it together," he said. "Some people make it; some people don't."

Vittana offers loans to send a student to school for a year in Peru, Nicaragua or Paraguay for less than $1,000. It works through local microfinance institutions (MFIs) such as Fundacion Paraguaya, to administer the loans. The money cycles from the individual lender to Vittana to the MFI to the student and back. The MFI charges borrowers interest on the loan of about 10 to 15 percent APR to cover its operating costs.

People attending the presentation wanted to know how long it would take to be repaid (in three years lenders get back the loan amount but without interest), and how Vittana can stay in business since it's not taking a cut of the loan. Vittana plans to support its operations through donations, which it will request and handle separately from the loans, similar to Kiva's model.

The non-profit has already drawn interest and investment from Facebook, which chose Vittana to participate in its incubator program.

"People have this image of what a poor person looks like." said Chakrabarti. "They should be wearing rags. They should be living in huts."

That's not always the case, he said. Students Vittana has helped fund have jobs at radio stations, they spend time on the Internet, they study banking and chemistry, and they dream big.

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.

This post was written by Hal Bernton

In Guangxi Province in southern China, a wealthy businessman who sells motorcycles has organized 20 volunteers who look after children and help clean the homes of the elderly.

It's a good program, said Luo Rixin, vice president of the Guangxi Regional Youth Federation. But it needs to get bigger and serve more people.

GREG BAKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nike says consumers who buy its products want the corporation to shoulder social responsibility.

Luo is one 18 young Chinese leaders who visited to Oregon recently for an unusual weeklong seminar to find out more about how activists in America and elsewhere innovate for social change.

A new generation of Chinese leaders is looking for creative approaches to address poverty, pollution and other problems unleashed by the fierce juggernaut of growth.

There has been a lot of buzz about social entrepreneurs. But the concept sometimes gets lost in translation.

"This [the United States] is so different from China, which is government taking the lead," said Dong Xia, a deputy secretary general of the All China Youth Federation. Two years ago the group reached out to Portland-based Mercy Corps to organize the seminar.

Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps senior vice president, noted that America has lessons to learn from China as well. "You have taken more people out of poverty than any other country in history..." he said.

The training was originally scheduled for May of last year, then postponed by the earthquake that ravaged Sichuan Province. The tragedy unleashed a huge wave of volunteers in China as tens of thousands of people donated time and labor to the recovery. Yet the government keeps many civil society groups under strict control.

The seminar explored partnerships between non-profits and governments. The Chinese learned how U.S. organizations sometimes hire lobbyists to gain funding from Congress. Zhou Mi, vice president of the Chongqing Municipal Youth Federation, wanted to know how much that lobbyist costs.

At the end of a day, there was also time set aside for a more familiar activity: shopping. The group received a special invite to the Nike employee store.

Read a longer report about the Chinese efforts to understand social entrepreneurship, with photos from the seminar, here.

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.

India is in focus next week with two major events in Seattle. The first, called "India Rising," will examine the country's move onto the world stage -- including its success in information technology -- and its business ties to Washington state. From 2005 to 2007, Washington state handled one-third of all U.S. trade with India.

India is a destination for both philanthropy dollars and commercial exports -- a place where many of Seattle's humanitarian efforts are aimed, from groups such as RDI, the Gates Foundation and Unitus, and a key market for state products such as airplanes, computers and electronics.

JOHN D MCHUGH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

India's "People's President" Abdul Kalam in 2005.

Wednesday's talk from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce will feature a delegation from the Indian Ministry of Commerce, along with South Asia expert Anand Yang, director of the Jackson School of International Studies at UW.

And on Saturday, April 25, the Seattle chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) will host Dr. Abdul Kalam, the president of India from 2002 to 2007, in a formal banquet from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. Kalam is a distinguished scientist who led development of India's missile program and nuclear tests, advocating a "peace through strength" policy and positioning India as a technology superpower.

He proposed a "National Prosperity Index (NPI)" to measure the growth rate of GDP along with two other factors: improvements in quality of life for people living below the poverty line, and the adoption of what he called Indian values, such as a strong family structure and a conflict-free, harmonious society.

GAUTAM SINGH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

India produces the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano, which went on sale this month for about $2,000. The Financial Times called it "a symbol of India's ambitions to become a modern nation." That's a funny statement considering Tata already owns Land Rover and Jaguar, the symbols of elite Britain.

India's economy is expected to grow about 6 percent in 2009 and 2010. Not sure where the National Prosperity Index would stand. Besides the focus on trade ties, the Indian visits should shed some light on the heated political situation with Pakistan. I will also be keeping an eye on the theme of social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are a key to India's economy and leaders of Indian communities abroad. Through groups like Ashoka, they also create some of the most promising and creative solutions to social problems.

And speaking of India, I didn't make it to the legendary blue city of Jodhpur, but some of that city's treasures have made it to Seattle, where they're on display until April 26 at Seattle Asian Art Museum. The exhibit features newly discovered paintings depicting palace life of India's great desert kingdom.

Microsoft product manager Xiang Li received a "blessing and gift" from her parents that she's now hoping to pass on to others. Li's family immigrated from China when she was 4 years old, in a large part to make sure she had a well-rounded education in the U.S.

"Ever since elementary school, my parents have always stressed the importance of education and its fundamental role in success and self-advancement," she said.

Inspired by Kiva's model of person-to-person micro loans, she and classmates at the University of Pennsylvania formed Givology. The three friends studying business and international studies also had common interests in international development and rural education.

"We wanted to become the Kiva in the worldwide education space through online peer-to-peer education grants and donations to students and communities struggling to access quality education," Li said.

XIANG LI

Givology Vice President Xiang Li is at right, with CEO Joyce Meng at center and President Jennifer Chen at left

Donors can view profiles of students and education projects on Givology's Web site and contribute any amount. Once a student or project is fully funded, the money is channeled to local partners in China, India, Uganda and Ecuador and then distributed to individual students or projects. A U.S. non-profit, Givology has partnerships in China, India, Uganda and Ecuador.

Li is building Givology's Seattle chapter, along with Kiley Williams, another Microsoft employee who is volunteering time to improve the organization's Web site. Givology is staffed entirely by volunteers.

Microsoft's volunteer connection program, which donates $17 per hour of employee volunteer time to a non-profit, has helped Li generate about $2,700 for Givology's operating costs.

Another site with similar roots, Qifang (meaning bloom), shows how philanthropy and social enterprise are becoming global. It involves another group of three friends on the other side of the Pacific.

Qifang CEO Calvin Chin was born in the U.S. but moved to China in 2004 to explore his parents' roots and develop his career.

He hopes to give people in the most populous and education-obsessed country a way to pay for college. He launched the Shanghai-based company as "China's online student loan community."

Chin also took his inspiration from Grameen Bank, Kiva and the U.S. personal loaning site Prosper. "Doing good while creating a strong, profitable, self-sustaining business, is part of our philosophy," he said.

China needs direct personal lending to reach the growing base of Internet users and help relieve the burden of high education costs. People in China spend more money on education than on anything else besides food, he said.

Education in China used to be free, but more recent efforts to privatize costs have left students with a heavier financial burden. Student loans aren't common, and only about 10 percent of students borrow from credit cooperatives, banks or government programs. That's where Qifang hopes to fill the gap.

Both Li and Chin see education as a means to break the cycle of poverty, and they want to give less fortunate kids the opportunity their parents gave them.

Li said while she admires Kiva's model of microlending, what she hopes to provide through Givology is something more fundamental: the knowledge to become successful.
For more information contact Li at xiang.li@givology.org

Ryan Calkins was driving home from work one day when he heard a familiar voice on the radio -- his old friend Matt Flannery talking about a new non-profit he started called Kiva. The two Northwest natives met as teenagers at a summer camp in Canada.

Calkins, now 32, loved the idea of a Web site that provided a simple way for people here to help people in developing countries by funding their businesses -- loaning them small amounts of money interest-free over the Internet, then tracking their progress.

KEITH STANSK

Calkins, left, visits a microfinance project in Colombia.

Calkins wanted to support Kiva and the burgeoning microfinance industry in Seattle, which has grown to at least 20 organizations, including Global Partnerships, Unitus, Washington CASH and others. In late 2007, he and a few friends created Seattle Microfinance or SeaMo as a kind of business chamber where people interested in the topic could meet and collaborate.

Seattle Microfinance, The group has 350 subscribers to its Web site and many others on its event invitation list. Most members are in their mid to late 20s, and Calkins described them as young professionals who work hard but realize how fortunate they are compared to the rest of the world.

"They have the sense they came by success because of opportunities they had," he said. "They won the birth lottery by being born in United States. They like the idea of giving back in a way that expands opportunities for others."

SeaMo's signature event, "Microfinance and Microbrews," packs Seattle bars with dozens of enthusiastic participants. The events feature a speaker from a local organization engaged in financial services for the poor. This month, SeaMo is hosting Flannery at Town Hall.

"Generally speaking I believe there's a Seattle ethos of this sort of we have an obligation to do good while were doing well," Calkins said.

But why does microfinance attract so much interest?

It appeals to people who aren't necessarily into the idea of charity, Calkins says. "A donation or loan that helps someone sustain themselves appeals to folks frustrated with the sort of handout philanthropy," he said. "Microfinance is the embodiment of the fishing metaphor [teaching to fish rather than giving out fish]."

Calkins said his own interest increased as he gained more experience as a small business owner. He is president of Statements Tile, a business his grandfather started and his dad continued. Calkins took over the Georgetown company when his dad retired last year.

He lived in Nicaragua and Columbia while working with the group Witness for Peace and returned to the region more recently with Global Partnerships.

It was striking while talking with with entrepreneurs in Nicaragua how much the conversations about business sounded like the ones he has in Seattle, he said.

"We had many of the same concerns -- I need line of credit to buy inventory," Calkins said. "How do you find good help? She may be sitting on $10,000 in inventory and I'm sitting on a few million, but business people speak the same language universally."

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.

It's a provocative question and a good one if you consider the system of lending to the poor rests on basic fundamentals that modern financial markets seem to have long forgotten, argues Alex Raksin in this column.

He says microfinance "offers a transformative vision," holding up Redmond-based Unitus as an example for its venture capital model and technology innovation to help microcredit programs succeed and expand.

Microloans generally have high repayment rates, but what happens when borrowers default? Often the problem can be traced back to borrowers spending their money on health care bills. So one of Unitus' microfinance partners created a solution by offering a health insurance program.

"Everything we've started since then has been a response to some social challenge, from micro-housing to micro-health insurance and even micro-water programs," says Ingrid Munro, founder of Jamii Bora. "To get out of the vicious cycle of poverty, people need more than just access to finance." They also need insurance, education, healthcare, and housing.

Microfinance as a whole has held up well despite the global recession.

"We never have felt any problems because we rely on deposits that we collect," says microcredit pioneer and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus. In Bangladesh Grameen started a microcredit fund, a fund from which microfinance organizations can borrow at wholesale rates and use to lend to the poor. As a social business, it doesn't depend on donations, and it's also separate from commercial banking.

Supporters of microcredit are working to change laws in other countries to allow microfinance organizations to accept savings deposits from the general public. That could push the concept of peer-to-peer lending to a new level.

The Grameen Foundation is expanding its microcredit program in New York City. It now has 500 borrowers and a repayment rate of 99 percent, Yunus said.

"So it shows a strength despite the fact that the economy is in bad shape and the financial system is in trouble."

Business isn't just about profit. For many people in Seattle, it has come to include social, ethical or environmental goals. And these days more non-profits are applying business savvy to achieve social change. Humanitarian organizations are borrowing ideas and methods from the venture capital world. The line between commerce and charity is blurring. To someone who has followed the business world through slightly jaded eyes for a decade, that's interesting. But will it work?

I'll be taking a look at this new breed of philanthropy, as well as social entrepreneurship and various local efforts to reach out all over the world with money and ideas. If you have a suggestion, please send it along.

The recent flush times ushered in a new generation of philanthropists with grand ambitions. Now with portfolios slashed and the future uncertain, will they stay the course in spite of the recession? That's a key question for 2009.

Small is big. Surprisingly, microfinance has been one of the economic bright spots at a time when conventional banks are in trouble and stock markets continually hammered.

We still live in a donation nation. Despite the largess of a few high-profile donors, most non-profits rely on modest donations from average people. How are you contributing and what are some lessons you'd like to share?

Stay tuned.

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