Initial relief turned to grief for Trilogy International Partners as it learned that five members of its wireless subsidiary in Haiti were killed in the earthquake or its aftermath.

The largest U.S. company in Haiti, Bellevue-based Trilogy provides mobile phone service through its Voilà subsidiary, which has about 575 employees.

Company executives initially thought the local workforce in Haiti had escaped without casualties. An inspection by its head of security following the earthquake found that all five of its buildings in Port-au-Prince remained intact, and the earthquake happened before the office closed for the day. Many employees returned to work Wednesday.

Yet a few days later Trilogy learned that five employees had died and about 35 others remain missing, said Carol Wilson, Trilogy's international compliance director.

Dozens of employees lost immediate family members and about 95 are without homes. The company's offices were filled with people camping out on the floor, Wilson said. The company is posting regular updates on the situation in Haiti here.

Trilogy engineers managed to get its network back up last Wednesday and it remains the only operational cellphone service in Port-au-Prince, but "the issue is congestion," Wilson said. Huge volumes of traffic are straining the network.

The company set up the non-profit Voilà Foundation to direct donations to relief efforts. Trilogy Chairman John Stanton and his wife, Theresa Gillespie, have pledged at least $1 million, and Trilogy International Partners has pledged $3 million.

A group of structural engineers flew from Seattle to Haiti today to go through the buildings to check further for structural damage.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported today that corporate donations to Haiti relief efforts have grown to $60 million. So far more than 120 companies have contributed to the cause, and 22 of them donated more than $1 million each.

Combined with record giving from individuals using social media and technology, and contributions by non-profits, help to Haiti is on track to be one of the largest relief efforts ever.

InterAction, the leading alliance of U.S. humanitarian and development groups, said today that organizations have committed and raised a combined total of $100 million to support the relief work.

Microsoft pledged at least $1.25 million in cash and in-kind donations to relief efforts in Haiti today as its disaster response team is reaching out to help relief agencies. Microsoft encouraged its 55,000 U.S. employees to make donations, which the company matches up to $12,000 per employee.

Akhtar Badshah, senior director of global community affairs, said Microsoft was also working through the organization NetHope, a network of large relief agencies and technology companies, supporting efforts to restore power and communications in Haiti.

So far, 1,600 Microsoft employees have contributed more than $280,000 to 100 non-profits working in Haiti, which are matched by the company.

California-based biotech Amgen, which has a research center with several hundred employees on Elliott Bay, said it will donate $2 million toward relief efforts. The Amgen Foundation will also use a disaster relief web site for staff around the globe to contribute funds to designated organizations, and the foundation will match them dollar for dollar.

"It is amazing to see how many companies have responded to the urgency of this tragedy," said Stephen Jordan, executive director of Business Civic Leadership Center at the U.S. Chamber. "We are encouraged by the early outpouring of support but we are well aware that this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint."

Other leading donors were:

--Digicel ($5 million) Digicel is the largest wireless service provider in Haiti (the other is Bellevue's Trilogy) and Digicel lost two of its employees in the earthquake.
--Trilogy International Partners ($3 million, plus $1 million from Chairman John Stanton and his wife, Theresa Gillespie).
--Deutsche Bank ($4 million)
--General Electric ($2.5 million)
--Citigroup ($2 million)
--Credit Agricole S.A. ($1.45 million)

The full list is here.

On Monday Starbucks announced a $1 million donation from The Starbucks Foundation to the American Red Cross for Haiti.

The non-profit Mobile Giving Foundation is now supporting text message donations for at least 17 different humanitarian organizations helping Haiti. Donations of $5 and $10 made by text message have now surpassed $20 million. A list of the organizations accepting mobile donations is here.

Eliminating the usual processing time for mobile donations, Verizon Wireless today said it transmitted almost $3 million to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief efforts, which represents the dollars pledged by its customers via text message donations so far.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air set up a program for frequent flier members to donate their miles to charitable groups involved in the relief effort in Haiti. Between now and Feb. 15, up to 5 million miles donated to the program will be matched one-for-one by the airlines.

The RealNetworks Foundation is donating $50,000 to Medical Teams International (MTI) for earthquake relief in Haiti. Nordstrom donated $50,000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund.

PCC Natural Markets (PCC) made a $25,000 donation to the American Red Cross.

The Hunger Site and GreaterGood.org sent $125,045 to Partners in Health today, a combination of online donations received through GreaterGood.org and contributions given by The Hunger Site and GreaterGood Network stores.

Amazon.com has a box on its homepage for contributions to Mercy Corps' Haiti relief efforts, which had helped channel close to $500,000 from customers by Friday afternoon. The Gap Foundation donated $150,000 and offered to match employee contributions, Best Buy contributed $100,000, Western Union $50,000 and Nike $25,000.

Bellevue-based wireless service company Trilogy International Partners, which operates in Haiti through its Voilà subsidiary, is providing the Mercy Corps team with a base of operations in Port-au-Prince.

In partnership with ITT, Mercy Corps will deploy five high-capacity water filtration units to provide much needed clean water in Haiti, and ITT is contributing a $100,000 donation, plus a double match for employee gifts.

Wireless industry veteran John Stanton has worked all over the world and experienced the devastation of hurricanes and other crises at home and abroad. Nothing compares to Haiti, he said.

The earthquake hit a country already burdened with unreliable infrastructure, political instability, deforestation, poverty and homelessness.

"The tragedies there prior to Tuesday were so enormous that the notion that Haiti would be the country that would suffer this devastating earthquake, it's hard to believe," said Stanton. "It's just beyond imagination how many bad things have happened to Haiti."

Stanton is chairman of Trilogy International Partners, which provides a third of Haiti's phone connections through its wireless service Voilà. With 500 employees, Voilà is one of the largest employers in Haiti, and Trilogy the largest U.S. investor in the country, having worked there for a decade, Stanton said.

Trilogy was fortunate that its building did not collapse and its employees seem to have all survived, Stanton said. "An astonishing number of our people reported for work yesterday and this morning," he said.

CRIS BIERRENBACH /ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man uses a cell phone as he holds a person's hand after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the largest ever recorded in the area, rocked Haiti on Tuesday.

Trilogy CEO Brad Horwitz arrived in Haiti today to assess the situation and support the company's local staff. In addition, Trilogy operates in the Dominican Republic, so it has been able to send supplies over by land from the adjacent country.

Traditional landlines are almost non-existent, so wireless service is critical for both basic communications and emergency relief work. In fact, locals in Haiti said people who were trapped under debris have called out for help from their cellphones, the Associated Press reported.

"We are essential infrastructure on a normal day," Stanton said. "In times of crisis the most important thing is getting our system back on the air, which it is."

Wireless companies are constantly monitoring their service, so they were among the first to learn about the earthquake.

Within hours, Trilogy chartered a plane from Miami carrying 14 engineers, along with radios, batteries and water. They were able to land in Haiti early Wednesday morning with help from the U.S. State Department and Kenneth Merten, the American ambassador to Haiti. They knew that relief workers needed the wireless network running to do their jobs.

That's not easy in a country without a functioning electrical grid in normal times. All of Voilà's cellular towers run on diesel generators. The damage had knocked out a line between fuel tanks and generators. Getting trucks to deliver fuel and repair lines was a challenge across Haiti's damaged roads.

Though the service was down for much of Wednesday, local staff and the engineers from Florida worked feverishly to get it restored by midnight last night.

With growing demand from aid workers and people getting back in touch with loved ones, "the network is going to get swamped," Stanton said. The company was working to prioritize calls for rescue crews.

About 30 percent of the cell sites remained damaged, some simply out of fuel and others buried under tons of rubble, Stanton said. Crews worked to repair them, but the situation was still unpredictable. With aftershocks "a bridge there yesterday might not be there tomorrow," he said. "Our ability to keep the system up is obviously limited by our ability to get fuel to every site that depends on it."

Looking longer term, with Haiti's fragile foundation and the enormous challenges ahead, "there's almost an unlimited amount of things that have to be done," Stanton said.

Trilogy, which received an award from the U.S. State Department last month for making a positive impact on the Haitian economy, will continue working with the micro-enterprise it created to provide opportunities for local entrepreneurs and with its partner, musician Wyclef Jean's Yéle Haiti foundation, to improve education, Stanton said. Voilà is Yéle Haiti's largest corporate sponsor and has been since Yele launched in 2005 with a $1 million donation from the company.

_________________________________________________________________

Mobile technology was proving important to Haiti in another way.

The earthquake has been "a watershed event," said Jim Manis, CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation, a Bellevue non-profit which provides the platform for people to send donations by text message and pay for it on their monthly bill.

In the last 36 hours, more than $7 million was raised for earthquake relief through mobile donations, which "exceeded all money we've raised through mobile giving since we began" in 2007, he said.

The foundation is processing donations for a dozen charities helping Haiti, including International Medical Corps, the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund and Yéle Haiti, the foundation run by Wyclef Jean. Donations have come in at a furious pace.

At the peak, "we hit 10,000 messages per second last night," Manis said. Since processing the donations can take 90 days, Manis said he has been working with companies such as Verizon to push funds through faster. Carriers may decide to pay the donations as soon as customers pledge, rather than after billing, he said.

Sam Dryden, an investor and entrepreneur, was named the Gates Foundation's new director of agricultural development today.

Dryden, a managing director of New York-based Wolfensohn & Company, an investment company, will begin the new post on Feb. 1. He replaces Dr. Rajiv Shah, who was sworn in Thursday as the administrator for USAID.

"Sam brings a wealth of experience to the foundation -- not only in agriculture, research and business, but also in a wide variety of projects related to agricultural development and public-private partnerships," said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation's Global Development Program. "His strong leadership qualities will help the team deliver on our strategy to help small farmers improve their lives."

In his new position, Dryden will lead a team attempting to help the world's poorest farming families boost productivity and incomes with better seeds, management training, access to markets and effective policies. The foundation, which has targeted agricultural improvements as one of its core missions, has committed $1.4 billion to agricultural development initiatives in Africa and South Asia.

Dryden has written and lectured widely on food security and economic development issues and served as an adviser on rural development for the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation.

At Wolfensohn, which was founded by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Dryden focused on investments in alternative energies. He formerly headed Emergent Genetics, which develops and markets seeds. Emergent Genetics, the third largest cotton seed company in the U.S., was acquired by Monsanto in 2005 in a $300 million deal.

The foundation's choice of Dryden raises a red flag for organizations that advocate against genetically modified crops, Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center on Food Safety, told the AP.

"Appointing someone like this as head of their agriculture project is a bad sign," Freese said.

Dryden has also been president and chief executive of Agrigenetics, a seed company now part of Dow AgroSciences, and was founder of Big Stone, a private venture and development company. His career began as an analyst with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Dryden has 25 years of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in the life sciences. He has served on a number of international boards and commissions focused on agriculture development, economic development and food security.

The Gates Foundation is getting some criticism from a local food co-op for supporting research into genetically modified crops to increase production in Africa.

PCC Natural Markets, the Seattle-based food co-operative, published a letter and editor's note this month taking a strong stance against genetic engineering of food.

"I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher,"
Dennis L. Weaver wrote in PCC's Sound Consumer.

"The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers," PCC editor Trudy Bialic added. She cited a $42 million Gates grant to a project involving Monsanto to produce corn resistant to drought "even though genetic engineering has failed to increase crop yields significantly, despite 20 years of research."

PCC, which has nine stores in the Puget Sound region and 47,000 members, is the largest consumer-owned natural food co-operative in the United States. Its staff writes a monthly report about issues in food safety and nutrition aimed at consumers.

Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy in the Gates Foundation's global development program, responded in a letter to PCC that the foundation is investing in a broad array of approaches and paying attention to environmental and economic sustainability.

"Most of our grants to improve seed quality use conventional breeding," Suzman wrote. "We include biotechnology when we believe there is potential to help farmers confront drought and disease, or to increase the nutritional content of food, faster or more effectively than conventional breeding alone."

The criticism by advocates of organic agriculture isn't new but illustrates a politically charged split over food, one that Bill Gates acknowledged in a speech in October at the World Food Prize symposium.

Gates said some critics are "instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity," and that such an "ideological wedge" could thwart major breakthroughs to help farmers deal with the effects of climate change.

"The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability -- and there is no reason we can't have both," he said.

But the local reaction reveals ongoing skepticism, even among an audience generally not at odds with Gates philanthropy.

"The organic community cannot buy into Bill's call to 'Let's just all hold hands, sing kumbaya, hug, air-kiss and "'get over" past "ideological" divides,' " Weaver wrote to PCC.

"I don't know exactly what is motivating the Gates Foundation to buy into the propaganda," Bialic said. "I think it's an ideology that technology can save the world."

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.

Today the Gates Foundation made nearly $3.4 million in grants to bolster Internet connections in libraries in five states.

Public libraries received grants for plans to improve and maintain Internet connections in Arkansas ($735,207), Kansas ($363,099), Massachusetts ($367,789), New York ($947,517), and Virginia ($977,468). The states were selected because they had a high number of libraries without high-speed Internet access that were struggling to increase their bandwidth for patrons.

Even in tech-savvy Seattle, I have gone into public libraries and found there's a waiting list to get online using library computers, which patrons with library cards can use for 90 minutes per day.

The Gates Foundation said it is giving technical and consulting assistance to 14 other states, including Washington, to help their libraries develop broadband proposals to compete for federal broadband stimulus funds.

For about 40 percent of Americans who have no Internet access at home, library connections provide the only way they can check their email, search for jobs and get all kinds of basic information that is increasingly available in digital form only. Sadly the country where the Internet was invented has fallen behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband deployment.

Libraries are hard pressed to keep up with growing demand, especially for higher bandwidth.

A study by the American Library Association found that 60 percent of all libraries say their current Internet speed is insufficient.

Nationwide broadband is the longer term solution. The Gates Foundation provided an analysis to the FCC in October that estimated the cost of installing fiber optic networks across 80 percent of schools, hospitals and other large institutions at $5 billion to $10 billion.

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.

Despite the lingering economic woes that most Americans are still feeling, only one in five plans to reduce donations to charity this holiday season, the American Red Cross found in a new survey. More Americans will cut back on travel, decorations, parties and gifts.

ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Volunteers Ken Newman, right, and Caren Shepsky heft a 50-pound bag of rice at the Cherry Street Food Bank, run by Northwest Harvest. As hunger has worsened, Northwest Harvest's pantry is seeing more than 2,500 visitors on busy days this year, up from a peak of 1,800 visitors last year.

The results tell a somewhat different story than a recent Harris Interactive survey that showed charities will probably see a decrease in generosity this season. Some large charities are preparing for lower holiday giving.

Regardless of how they interpret the data, charities are downsizing their appeals and targeting smaller donations. They're also making the most of free social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and asking supporters to help them spread the word.

The United Way of King County recently launched its Give 10/Tell 10 campaign, which asks for $10 contributions to help struggling families hit by the recession avoid falling into homelessness. After making a gift on the site, donors have the option to pass on a message emailed to 10 friends, encouraging them give, too. The charity is also using Twitter and Facebook to network, post links and share facts, such as "$25 = a week of food for a homeless person in Washington."

"We really wanted to do something different to get the word out to people that the needs are so great right now and provide a low barrier way for them to get involved," said United Way spokesman Jared Erlandson. "The thought was what if we could get people to tweet not just about what they are doing tonight, but about how they just helped someone stay in their home for the holidays then we could really have an effective vehicle to get our message out."

Mercy Corps is getting creative around Thanksgiving with a new online tool that allows families and groups of friends to make donations together. The global charity is calling on people to match the amount they spend on their own Thanksgiving Day meal with a donation that fights global hunger. The average American family spent $45 on Thanksgiving dinner in 2008, Mercy Corps said.

Other interesting new twists include gift cards with a $5 donation to charity built in. The recipient can choose where to direct the $5 gift from among more than 5,000 charities.

Getting donor fatigue? Another option is to vote for your favorite charity and have a large bank pick up the tab. Chase is donating $5 million -- $25,000 each to the top 100 charities on Dec. 15, one $1 million and five $100,000 grants to others in February, and another $1 million chosen by an advisory board of active philanthropists.

You've heard of blood diamonds. Now mobile phones and other technology products are being targeted for containing minerals sold by armed groups engaged in war and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A House bill introduced today by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) aims to curb that trade by identifying which mines are in conflict zones and requiring importers of related mineral goods to certify whether or not their imports contain minerals from those mines. Companies would have two years to implement the requirements, and the U.S. Trade Representative would report on their compliance.

McDermott said the conflict in eastern Congo is the deadliest since World War II and is fueled in a large part by the multi-million dollar trade in minerals. Armed groups generate an estimated $144 million each year by trading ores used to produce tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, he said.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (attached here) requires companies to use outside auditors to determine whether refiners are "conflict-free." The USTR will report to Congress and the public which companies are importing goods containing conflict minerals.

In a report last December, the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo found armed groups in the eastern region continue to fight over, illegally plunder, and profit from the trade of columbite-tantalite (coltan), cassiterite, wolframite, and gold. Such groups enslave child soldiers and use rape as a weapon.

Minerals from the DRC are used in industrial and tech products worldwide, including mobile phones, laptops and digital video recorders.

Companies and consumers have the ability to make an impact. But enforcement of such a law seems tricky. A couple of questions come to mind immediately -- will companies really be able to identify sources of their supplies that clearly? Even if they can, two years is a long time in an entrenched and brutal conflict that claims lives daily. And what about China (the world's largest market for mobile phones) and its hunger for resources with a no-strings-attached policy for dealing in Africa? This report identified European firms fueling conflict minerals.

The bill has the support of the Information Technology Industry Council and the Enough Project, a Washington D.C. group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity in Africa. I wrote a bit about local efforts here.

Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast said he expects a legislative battle. "The electronics industry has spent about 2 million dollars per month lobbying to relax similar, yet weaker, legislation in the Senate (S. 891)," he writes. He urged consumers to push for passage of the bill. "Together we can help turn a system of exploitation and violence into one of peace and opportunity."

U.S. legislation would be a good start to address the problem, said Rory Anderson, deputy director for advocacy and government relations for Federal Way-based World Vision, which works in eastern DRC and endorsed McDermott's bill.

"Americans deserve to know whether the electronics they buy are fueling bloodshed in Africa," she said, adding that the law would benefit the electronics and software industries by providing a certified mechanism to label their products "conflict free."

"We saw from the success of our 'conflict diamond' campaign a few years ago that American companies want to do the right thing," she said, but "without a uniform process, such as the one proposed in this legislation, it's very difficult for companies to tackle the supply chain challenge on their own."

By Sandi Doughton

Fear is as infectious as any virus, and gives many Americans a warped view of the dangers posed by vaccines, genetically engineered crops and other beneficial technologies, New Yorker writer Michael Specter said in Seattle Tuesday.

Touting his new book "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives," Specter took aim at the kind of anti-science sentiment he says is hijacking public discourse and policy.

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ice sculptures by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo melt on the steps of Berlin's Concert Hall in a WWF event aimed at calling attention to the earth's melting poles. Specter's book on denialism has been criticized for not tackling the issue of global warming.

"We need to step back and look at the other side of every issue - and we never do," Specter said at a lecture at the University of Washington sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

He was particularly critical of parents, like many who live on Vashon Island, who refuse to vaccinate their children. "This is insane," he said. "Vaccines are the most effective public health measure in the history of the world, except for clean water."

Study after study has shown no evidence that vaccines cause autism, yet people ignore a mountain of data and instead focus on unproven horror stories from neighbors or things they read on the Web, he said. "People jump to conclusions. They decide what makes sense to them intuitively."

While vaccination rates climb in the developing world, they are dropping in the United States and Western Europe - endangering more than the families who chose not to give their kids the shots, Specter said. Last year, children in Minnesota died of haemophilus influenzae for the first time since a vaccine was introduced 18 years ago.

Specter has written for The New Yorker about Bill Gates and his technologically-oriented crusade to improve global health. He's also covered the quest to develop synthetic life-forms, the AIDS epidemic and computer hackers.

Specter's Seattle audience was receptive to his pro-science message, but others have accused him of uncritically accepting arguments in favor of genetically engineered crops. See Tom Philpott's take in Grist.

The same review in Grist also took Specter to task for failing to grapple with the growing numbers of Americans who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence for global warming.

But Specter said he intentionally left that out because it's already been extensively covered.

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.

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.

By Sandi Doughton

Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton joked that his lecture at the University of Washington Monday night would be "metrics-free," but the outspoken Brit couldn't help making the case for better data to guide global health and development programs.

Many of the current darlings of philanthropy, such as microcredit, have little solid evidence to back them up, Horton said. One recent study in the Philippines concluded that the small loans did not improve community well-being and actually led to contraction of small businesses.

"These fashions that grip us in waves ... when you actually end up looking at the data can often seem to be very, very thin," he said.

When the book "Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There's a Better Way for Africa," argued that $1 trillion in international aid has only increased corruption, war and poverty, the development community had little to offer in rebuttal, Horton told the audience of faculty and students.

"We have badly failed to gather data on what a trillion of aid has done."

UW global health professor Steven Gloyd said he picked Horton to present the Steven Stewart Gloyd endowed lecture partly because of the UK-based Lancet's courage in publishing controversial papers, including one that estimated 650,000 civilians have been killed in the Iraq war, and one by researchers at the UW's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that found many childhood vaccination numbers were inflated.

Horton, who works closely with IHME, is known for poking at the powerful, including the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. His journal recently published a critique of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's accountability and emphasis on technological solutions to global health problems.

But like everyone else in global health, the Lancet has received money from the giant philanthropy: $200,000 to publish a series on maternal and child mortality.

Horton said he'd like to see universities like the UW provide a forum where data on development and global health can be freely available - and critically evaluated.

The UW can also provide a counterbalance to Seattle's global health giant, the Gates Foundation, Horton said.

"I would hate it if Seattle was only seen as the center of technology in global health. The university can provide that added perspective to what comes out of the Northwestern U.S., and that's absolutely critical."

Norm Rice has only been on the job at the Seattle Foundation since July, but he aims to broaden the foundation's base from hundreds of wealthy donors to more than a million people in King County.

"Everybody can give, whether it's $5 or $5 million," he said.

BARBARA KINNEY

Norman Rice, former Seattle mayor and current CEO of the Seattle Foundation.

The Seattle Foundation is one of the largest community foundations in the country and the fifth largest foundation in Washington state, according to the Foundation Center, with assets of about $570 million.

With a staff of 26, the foundation has 1,200 funds under its umbrella, ranging in size from $30,000 to many millions of dollars. They include bequests from people who have made gifts to charity in their wills, and active "donor-advised funds," which help philanthropists invest their assets and make grants to charitable causes without the time and expense of running their own foundations. The foundation charges fees averaging 1 percent of the fund's balance.

Rice said he wants to get more people involved, with or without a fund. It's part of a sea change in philanthropy, a shift from passive donations to a new model shaped by a younger generation eager to see results and be personally engaged.

To broaden its appeal, the Seattle Foundation is revamping its Web site to offer detailed profiles and reviews of the non-profits and programs it funds, and allow online donations for the first time. The new Web site, expected to be launched early next year, will also have an Amazon.com-style recommendations feature to help people find programs related to their interests.

His goal is to reach as many as 1.5 million people over the next several years, getting them involved in some way with the foundation's programs. He'd also like to increase the number of donor-advised funds the foundation manages from the current 750.

Even without a lot of money to give, he thinks people can help support its long-term strategy to improve the community by working in seven areas: basic needs, the environment, the economy, education, arts and culture, neighborhoods and communities, and health and wellness.

Rice said he wants to focus particular attention on workforce development and early childhood learning.

Speaking to the Seattle Philanthropic Advisors Network (SPAN), the former Seattle mayor said he thinks "foundations are in an enviable place to be change agents" and show governments new ways to solve problems.

The foundation's assets, down 27 percent last year, have bounced back somewhat this year, growing 17 percent from January through the third quarter. While it has had to make significant cuts in its operating budget, Rice said he doesn't expect the foundation to reduce its grant making.

After taking a financial blow in the past year, non-profits have been forced to work with fewer resources. More than ever, it makes sense for them to consolidate, Rice said.

He suggested a "non profit mergers and acquisitions fund," where "those who come together get the dollars. I just believe some things we're funding are doing too many things that are alike."

"Every organization needs to look at themselves to see what they do best," he said. If someone else is doing it better, they should partner or concentrate on something else.

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.

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.

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.

Philanthropic efforts, when combined with the possibilities of the Internet, are producing interesting hybrids, and crowdsourcing ideas for development is one of them.

The Peace Corps is testing such an approach with Africa Rural Connect (ARC), an online community where creativity and global collaboration are the goals, and the best ideas can win $20,000 in funding. See the current top 10 ideas here. Oct. 15 is the deadline for submitting projects for the current contest.

PEACE CORPS

Molly Mattessich, pictured at right during her Peace Corps service in Mali, with her host, Niama Keita. She now manages an online site to take global ideas and apply them to problems she saw firsthand as a volunteer.

Anyone can submit an idea, endorse existing ideas and suggest improvements to them.

Hosted by the National Peace Corps Association, the site connects over 200,000 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, African Diaspora, non-profit leaders, technology buffs and anyone else who has a solution for Africa's development challenges.

It uses a software called Wegora, designed to encourage a global exchange of ideas.

"We are excited about the caliber of ideas that have been posted on the site so far and we're really seeing the Wegora technology help foster a whole new way of thinking online about these types of issues," says Molly Mattessich, manager of Africa Rural Connect and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. "The volume of posts from people and groups around the world has steadily increased and we hope to see that trend continue in the coming months."

The University of Washington again led the nation in the number of Peace Corps volunteers last year, with 104. Washington state has had more Peace Corps volunteers (8,087) than any other state except California and New York. A blending of humanitarian idealism with innovative technology seems to characterize perfectly this region's strengths.

Another such experiment with funding charity based on the wisdom of the crowd is Paul Buchheit's Collaborative Charity project.

Buchheit, the lead developer of Google's Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, introduced his project by declaring "I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes."

So far he has received 18,968 votes on 419 ideas from 3,274 people. Among the most popular ideas was the Talking Book project (with brightly colored Talking Books pictured above) by Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge.

The founders of a new Seattle non-profit called SaveTogether think so.

They are pairing low-wage workers in the U.S., many of them working moms, with people willing to help them save small amounts at a time to reach their goals of education, home ownership or opening a small business.

A saver starts with $25, a donor chips in $25 and a non-profit matches that with another $25, tripling the saver's original amount. So savers can earn two more dollars for every dollar they save.

Sandra is one of the clients of SaveTogether, saving $120 a month to expand her hair salon business in San Francisco.

The non-profit operates a Kiva-like online model, relying on the generosity of strangers to help people profiled on the site realize their dreams. Other Seattle-based efforts that build on Kiva's success with peer to peer online philanthropy include Vittana, a non-profit started by former Amazon employees that helps fund educational loans, and Jolkona and See Your Impact, which help young people get involved in philanthropy by making small donations and tracking their progress.

SaveTogether co-founder and CEO Dylan Higgins likens it to a 401(k) match for low-wage workers.

Convincing donors to help people they don't know save money could be a challenge, Higgins acknowledged. But it's about encouraging responsibility, he said.

"These people have already taken steps to better themselves and you are helping speed the process."

After law school at the University of Washington, Higgins worked as a fellow for microlending Web site Kiva in Ghana, where he got the inspiration for the project.

The Spokane native remembers being struck by the number of borrowers who had trouble finding a way to save, while at the same time he saw the economy in the U.S. on the verge of collapse because of an overindulgence in credit.

"I was amazed how these two apparently different worlds were reacting in a similar way," he said. "They both needed savings to come to the forefront again. It was an amazing epiphany for me. I studied economics as an undergrad and was always frustrated that Americans were poor savers."

SaveTogether aims to build on the success of Individual Development Accounts, matched savings accounts for working poor who are trying to buy their first home, pay for college or start a small business. IDAs are supported by organizations such as the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and are funded by government and private sources. Seed funding for SaveTogether came from CFED.

Caroline is a nursing student saving to complete her studies at a university in Boston. She arrived in the U.S. from Uganda last year.

Recently I have been writing about new programs by the Gates Foundation and others that recognize savings as an essential part of financial well being and help people build assets. One study showed that low-income Americans who participated in matched savings programs weathered the recession relatively well. Almost none of them lost their homes.

The same study, while giving Washington state good marks overall, said the state could improve its low rates of micro enterprise and small business ownership by making capital more widely available through micro loan programs, restoring funding for Individual Development Accounts and training more entrepreneurs.

The non-profit is helping people such as Sandra, a single mother of five in San Francisco who runs her own salon and is saving to expand it; Andria, a 20-year-old who is the main breadwinner in her family and is saving for college tuition; and Raymond, a Native American father of two in Spokane who is saving to open a business.

Dylan Higgins is CEO of SaveTogether.

Robert Friedman, CFED's founder and chairman, said he has witnessed matched savings programs change the lives of poor working families for almost 20 years. He now supports several of SaveTogether's featured savers. They are screened and selected by the partners, including Neighborhood Assets of Spokane and Opportunity Fund of San Francisco.

SaveTogether has tried to build in a kind of fraud-protection system. It collects the matched funds from donors, holding them until the saver reaches his or her goal. SaveTogether then disburses the funds to the local non-profit partner and they release the funds directly to the vendor. For example, the organization writes the check to the university, not the student, or to the mortgage company, not the home buyer. This ensures that the saver uses the matching funds for the specified purpose, Higgins said.

Higgins and his partners were looking to work with a non-profit in Seattle, such as Washington CASH, but the United Way of King County no longer administers the individual development account programs and has transferred the operation to the YMCA to help foster youth save.

"For all those other uses of matched savings for business, homeownership and education, it remains to be seen what kind of market we will have in King County," Higgins said.

For now SaveTogether is working with organizations in Spokane, Boston and the Bay Area and hopes to expand around the country and eventually overseas.

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.

___________________________________________________________________

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.

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."

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.

Technology holds the key to solving problems of health, education and poverty, Bill Gates made a point of saying in his recent visit to India.

The wholehearted embrace of technology comes as no surprise from the chairman of the world's largest software company. But in the context of philanthropy, perhaps he should have added the words "when appropriate."

MANISH SWARUP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Indian President Pratibha Patil, left, hands the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development to Bill Gates as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, second left, applauds.

Gates touted the benefits of computers to help rural people access video lectures in villages without schools, and mobile devices to help doctors examine patients remotely. Slum dwellers in Bangalore can use mobile phones with SMS messaging and GPS to find jobs as day laborers through a Gates Foundation-supported program called LabourNet. Technology can reduce government corruption if citizens can use mobile phones and public computer terminals to give feedback on public services, he said.

"I am a 24-hour technology person," Gates said.

He visited India to assess the foundation's programs and receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development on behalf of the foundation. His appearances seemed to be a mix of the foundation's work and Microsoft's mission. Gates said Microsoft would like to partner with the Indian government in a project to provide each of India's 1.17 billion citizens with a unique identity number and biometric card.

The visit came after recent suggestions that the Gates Foundation's Avahan program has not lived up to its goals of curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The $258 million initiative has been led by highly paid business consultants rather than people with public health experience. After the Indian government balked at taking on what has become one of India's largest health programs, the Gates Foundation increased its funding by $80 million.

In health and development, high-tech solutions don't always work. They can even make things worse if applied in the wrong way, by diverting resources from more fundamental programs or missing the root cause of a problem, for example.

Sometimes the most appropriate technology is none at all. Ironically this point was made best by one of the Gates Foundation's biggest grantees: PATH.

Its name stands for Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, and the idea behind that was reflected in a speech by Margarita Quintanilla earlier this year in Seattle.

Quintanilla, PATH's country leader in Nicaragua, got her start working at the ground level as a community health coordinator teaching basic concepts as washing hands to avoid diseases and getting regular pap screenings. She realized that technology could not overcome one of the biggest obstacles to health: gender-based violence and its effects, contributing to the spread of diseases like HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancy and other problems, all of which are common in India. Her approach was to build projects to teach life skills and health education to pre-adolescent girls and promote respect for women in families.

The more PATH's work grew, the more Quintanilla realized it would have to include "both technical and social approaches to increase the country's capacity to ensure better health," she said.

"We have to be wise and intelligent in our solutions. We have the responsibility of promoting change in the right way."

About 800 people listened to Quintanilla, but billions listen to Gates. As one of the world's most respected voices, he has a unique opportunity to call attention to social issues that no technology alone can solve.
________________________

UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn analyze the links between gender discrimination and poverty, child mortality, global health issues and other problems in this excellent magazine series.

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.

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.

InfoSpace is introducing a search engine that supports charitable causes called Do Great Good.

As users search on Do Great Good, half of the net revenue generated on the Web site is donated by InfoSpace to various charities, the Bellevue-based company said today. The site is an expansion of InfoSpace's Dogpile search engine.

It's similar to GoodSearch, a search engine started in 2005 by other dot-com veterans. GoodSearch donates 50 percent of its revenues to charities and schools designated by users. Users can choose from more than 80,000 non-profits on this site.

GoodSearch, based in Los Angeles, said it hopes to take advantage of the $8 billion generated annually by search engine advertisers to capture a portion for philanthropic causes.

GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo, while Do Great Good is powered by metasearch technology that combines results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.

Both services are free to users. They make money from companies paying to show display ads when visitors click on those ads within the search results.

"Many people would like to donate to charities and nonprofits, but the tough economic hardships facing our country today make it difficult," said John Rodkin, InfoSpace general manager of search. "Do Great Good users make a positive difference in others' lives without having to open their wallets -- simply by searching the Web."

Do Great Good does not have a feature that allows users to choose their own charity. Instead, it pools the funds and distributes them to charities at the end of each quarter. The site supports 20 charities that serve pets in need, including Petfinder.com Foundation, Animal Charities of America and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and has donated over $50,000 so far.

The program is expanding to include health services, education, and the environment, InfoSpace said.

Americans conducted 14 billion searches in June, according to comScore. Google led the market 65 percent of the searches, followed by Yahoo with almost 20 percent, and Microsoft with a little over 8 percent. InfoSpace had less than 1 percent of the search market.

This afternoon the micro-lending site Kiva will be hosting an open conference call to get feedback on its pilot program in the United States.

The program has generated mixed reactions and a protest led by a Seattle lender who thinks Kiva should stop featuring borrowers from the U.S. The U.S. loans deviate from Kiva's original mission to help the poorest, said Tom Behan.

"New Kiva loans are facilitating the richest country on the planet in making loans to itself," Behan said.

Kiva spokeswoman Fiona Ramsey said the non-profit expected the move to be somewhat controversial.

At the same time, "We never saw ourselves as just a platform for Americans to loan to developing countries," she said. "We've received emails for years from people who say that charity begins at home -- why aren't you giving me an opportunity to do that?"

One positive outcome has been the high degree of interest and engagement of Kiva users who feel strongly about the issues, Ramsey said.

Kiva is working through two microfinance partners: ACCION USA and the Opportunity Fund. Those organizations select entrepreneurs to post on the Kiva site. Recent U.S. borrowers have ranged from a New York homeless man to a San Francisco architect.

Each partner has caps on the number of loans it can post. Even if they each reached the limit, the U.S. loans would not exceed 5 percent of Kiva's total global portfolio, Ramsey said.

Right now the partners are going through an adjustment period, Ramsey said, getting direct feedback from Kiva users about the types of borrowers and projects they would like to see. She summarized the reaction along these lines:

"The homeless guy -- that story brought me to tears," she said. "The architect -- I'm not buying it."

Kiva.org, the Web site that ignited the online micro-lending phenomenon, took a bold new direction last month when it decided to offer loans to borrowers in the United States.

It was a significant step for an organization started to help the poorest borrowers in the world gain access to credit. Kiva CEO Matt Flannery talked a bit about his reasoning here, saying that poverty has become borderless, especially in light of the global recession.

The decision has come under fire from some long-time Kiva supporters, including Tom Behan, a retired advertising executive from Seattle who has made dozens of loans to people in more than 20 countries through the site.

Behan is spearheading an effort to get Kiva to stop lending to people in the U.S. and "return its original mission; that of making loans where needs are the greatest, not the least."

So far 421 people have joined the group of Kiva lenders opposed to what they call "a shameful deviation from Kiva's core mission." The unhappy Kiva lenders expressed their frustration with the illustration at right.

"Kiva built its reputation on alleviating poverty in the Third World," Behan said. "It started out with a pure intention of helping a different segment of the population: the bottom of the bottom."

Of 1,645 people who have responded to a poll on the issue, 48 percent said they support Kiva's decision to allow loan requests in the U.S., while 43 percent oppose it, and about 10 percent are undecided.

"I'm not denying the need in the United States for assistance," Behan said. "I've started small businesses myself, and I've got family members right now that are out of work."

But he cited a recent loan request from a San Francisco man with a degree in architecture who wanted to try his hand at Web design and needed $7,000 to do it.

"That's $7,000 which previously would have been available to perhaps 7-10 other borrowers in developing countries," Behan said.

Other Kiva users say the decision doesn't harm anyone, since lenders can vote with their wallets and choose to fund loans in poor countries instead.

With the recession tightening credit, Kiva spokeswoman Fiona Ramsey said the U.S. loans are a way to "give opportunities to entrepreneurs who really need it right now, and give lenders a chance to help those in their backyard, not just those in other parts of the world."

Have an opinion? Kiva has scheduled a community conference call July 15 at 2 p.m. Pacific, when anyone can call in and offer feedback on the issue. Details are here under the July 8 entry.

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.

Adnan Mahmud's inspiration to create a new kind of charity started when he passed a stranger at a cemetery.

He was in Bangladesh visiting his grandfather's grave when he saw a man who clearly didn't have money for his own son's funeral.

The man was carrying his dead son, dressed only in a pair of shorts. He couldn't afford the traditional white cloth used to shroud the dead for a proper Muslim burial.

"There were vendors selling cloth for 50 cents or a dollar," Mahmud said. "I could have helped him, but by the time I came to the realization I was already back home."

MIKE SIEGEL/SEATTLE TIMES

Adnan Mahmud and Nadia Khawaja are founders of Jolkona, a non-profit designed to encourage young philanthropists.

Even a small amount of money can make a huge difference in the life of another person, he thought, but the problem was how to connect them.

"I couldn't have saved his son, but I could have at least helped ease the pain a little bit," he said.

Mahmud, 31, a program manager at Microsoft Research, thought about the many young professionals he knew who want to do some good but don't have the resources of Bill Gates.

"They'll all tell you 'I want to make a difference, but I don't know what I can do,'" he said.

The solution was to create an online space for people to get excited about philanthropy with just a couple hundred dollars a year.

So in 2007 he and his wife, Nadia Khawaja, created the non-profit Jolkona Foundation. Jolkona is a Bengali word meaning "a drop of water."

"Small drops of money can add up and make a ripple of changing the world," said Khawaja, 26. She was drawn to social service after a stint as a volunteer math tutor in South Central Los Angeles during college. "I don't want to just work in the corporate world, not feeling like I'm making a difference when there's so many problems going on."

After six months of testing, their Web site went live this month. Similar to Kiva and Global Giving, it lets people channel funds to specific people and causes. It also gives them new tools for monitoring their impact. Mahmud said he was put off by large conventional charities because it was hard to choose specific programs or know exactly how contributions were used.

"It goes into this black hole," he said. "I don't know what happens to it."

Jolkona's founders are part of a growing number of young people demanding more control of their philanthropy. A generation used to connecting around the world through Facebook now wants a face and a direct connection to someone they're helping.

Donors can pinpoint countries where they want to contribute and choose from five categories: cultural identity, education, empowerment, environment and public health. Projects can be filtered by the amount of dollars needed, going down to as little as $5, and the duration, from less than a month to six years.

"For young professionals, you're so busy it's hard to do research," Khawaja said. "You just get lazy. It's on your list to do, but it just doesn't get done."

"Our goal was to use technology to engage youth and make it as simple as possible to donate," Mahmud said.

The site also offers what it calls "tangible proofs for every gift."
"If you give $50 to buy library books, you'll actually know what books they bought with your donation," Mahmud said.

A person's donations are broken down into charts and graphs that look as detailed as a 401K portfolio, pages that Mahmud calls "a resume of good."

Mahmud opens up his account and sees an update on a project he's been supporting in India, helping a pregnant woman in a Calcutta slum. "Look, on the 20th she had her baby," he said. "Adopting" a mother and her baby costs $235, and donors can follow their progress for three and a half years.

In Afghanistan there's a school for girls, where $40 provides 10 months of educational expenses. Donors can see the name of a girl and "at the end of 10 months you'll see the report card," Mahmud said. For $30 you can buy seeds, tools and training for women farmers in Sudan.

Some non-profits might loathe such micro-management by donors. Mahmud acknowledges that the model isn't for every one. But for small non-profits without budgets for IT departments, it's a way to supplement other funding and reach a new generation of donors. So far they've found 19 partners and 39 projects.

Jolkona has raised $3,000 from 50 friends in six months of testing. The couple has funded the non-profit themselves, with help from volunteers and one paid software developer. Since all donations go to the charities, they created a separate button for donations to offset operating costs.

Mahmud says the next step is to get more people involved, using online tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. A small group of volunteers will be traveling to different countries and blogging about their experiences on the Jolkona site, hoping to inform and inspire others.

This post was written by Sandi Doughton:

In the final hour of a Seattle conference on tuberculosis today, an African activist chided a room full of top health officials, scientists and other experts for their lack of action.

"The gap between rhetoric and reality grows bigger and bigger," said Paula Akugizibwe, regional treatment advocacy coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

Akugizibwe said she won't attend anymore conferences like the Pacific Health Summit, where the same people say the same things, then jet off to yet another conference for more of the same.

"We are sitting in fancy hotels, and people are dying," she said. "We've been talking about this for way too long. It's a travesty."

Many of the world's most powerful public health officials attended the conference, including World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan, UNICEF chief Ann Veneman, and top officials from the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the sponsors.

The topic of the final session was how to boost media coverage of tuberculosis and create a sense of urgency about a disease that kills 2 million people a year, mostly in the developing world.

Press coverage of the conference itself was restricted, though. Journalists were allowed to attend, but not to quote participants by name or affiliation without their express permission.

Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Global Relations and one of the most outspoken flamethrowers in attendance, told the group she couldn't understand why they couldn't create a sense of urgency, when the situation is so dire that officials should be "running around with their hair on fire."

For example, when nearly half a million new cases of multi-drug-resistant TB occur around the world each year, Kenya recently announced it can only afford to provide the costly treatment to 40 patients, Garrett said.

Dr. Krista Dong, who works with TB and AIDS patients in South Africa, said the conference was too focused on technology, like new drugs and vaccines and quicker ways to diagnose tuberculosis. Even if those things were available today, clinics and hospitals in Africa couldn't use them, she said. Most medical workers don't even have basic tools, like the special face masks needed to protect them from TB and prevent its spread. There's no room to isolate TB patients. Instead, they're all crowded into the same room, but then they share bathrooms with other patients.

"If you could lift (one of these hospitals) up and drop it here in Seattle, it would immediately be wrapped, quarantined and burned," Dong said.

Garrett pointed out that the little-known H8, or Health 8, made up of the world's top global health officials, meets Friday in Seattle. She called on the forum, which rarely reveals its agenda or conclusions, to take some concrete steps to help people with tuberculosis.

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.

As members of NetHope continue their annual meeting in Redmond this week, it's fascinating to look at how the landscape of technology has moved from responding to crises to creating solutions tailor-made for development itself.

These worlds are increasingly converging in places like Seattle.

On Thursday evening at MOHAI, NetHope co-founder Ed Granger-Happ of Save the Children and CIOs of Oxfam, CARE and The Nature Conservancy will talk about how information and communications technology affect the work of humanitarian agencies in "International Relief, Development and Conservation in the Cloud."

SCOTT COHEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kentaro Toyama shows a project designed to help people who are illiterate use computers.

Also Thursday Microsoft will announce a $2.4 million software donation to The Nature Conservancy to develop a virtual world for collaboration, based on SharePoint and other technology.

The software will help The Nature Conservancy bring together scientists, conservation managers, volunteers and hundreds of local partners working in 700 offices in 30 countries, allowing them to collaborate virtually and respond to rapidly changing conditions.

The Nature Conservancy, like other non-profits, has seen its donations fall during the global recession. One of the first things to be cut from constrained NGO budgets is information technology, yet that plays an increasingly important role in the speed and efficiency of humanitarian efforts.

Other hot topics discussed in the context of philanthropy include text-message donation campaigns and mobile phone banking for microfinance projects.

Kentaro Toyama, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, writes a cautionary note about how technology projects involving PCs and mobile phones can sit like rusting tractors in a field unless they're designed with local institutions and people, who are willing (and able) to maintain them.

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.

PATH received two major grants this week for work on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

One is a $35 million three-year contract to help Ethiopian communities respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Seattle global health non-profit received the grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to help nongovernmental organizations improve and coordinate their efforts to provide services for people affected by HIV/AIDS.

SIEGFRIED MODOLA / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ethiopians crowd a rural road as they line up to be examined at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) outreach center in southern Ethiopia.

About 2 percent of people in Ethiopia are living with HIV, according to UNAIDS. Ethiopia has a relatively low level of the disease, particularly when compared to sub-Saharan Africa where HIV affects more than 20 percent of the population in some countries.

But in urban areas of Ethiopia, as much as ten percent of the population is affected, and the epidemic which has undermined the workforce, reduced life expectancy and weakened health systems. Further background on the situation in Ethiopia is here and here.

The USAID project aims to improve access to HIV/AIDS treatment and services, strengthen community and home-based services, and raise awareness and demand for high-quality affordable services. PATH is targeting more than 900,000 people in 300 towns.

MARK HARRISON/SEATTLE TIMES

PATH, the global health non-profit, is moving its headquarters from Ballard to the 2201 Westlake Buildling.

Partners include Dawn of Hope Ethiopia Association, Hope for Children Organization, International HIV/AIDS Alliance, International Relief & Development, International Training & Education Center on HIV, Mekdim Ethiopia National Association, Organization for Social Services for AIDS, and Westat.

PATH also received a US$17 million grant from the Canadian International Development Agency to strengthen HIV-prevention efforts through research and evaluation of the effectiveness of different strategies. The program's objective is assess how best to avert HIV infections among high-risk populations.

PATH is expanding and moving its Seattle headquarters from Ballard to South Lake Union, where many of its partners working in biotechnology are clustered.

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.

Two characteristics seem to be emerging from the Obama Administration's agriculture policy -- a global outlook and confidence in technology solutions.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack lately has been talking about the link between food security and global stability, warning that unless countries take immediate steps to sharply boost agricultural productivity and reduce hunger, the world risks fresh social instability.

Just how to do that is an important but controversial question.

ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Farmers in developing countries face price volatility, changing weather patterns and other pressures

With the challenge of feeding the world's population compounded by climate change, Vilsack called on G8 countries to back the use of science in agriculture, including genetically modified organisms, to boost productivity, according to the Financial Times and coverage of the issue on the Grist.org Web site.

Earlier this week, Vilsack nominated Gates Foundation agricultural development director Rajiv Shah as chief scientist and undersecretary for research, education and economics.

Shah, the bright star at the Gates Foundation who helped design the partnership for a new Green Revolution in Africa (and recruit Kofi Annan as its chair), will now be in a position to shape much of the research and science policy within the federal government.

The move was praised by the chairman of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, among others. William Danforth chairs the non-profit institute, which received a $3.3 million grant from the Gates Foundation to enhance the nutritional value of cassava through genetic engineering. This year the center received $5.4 million from the Gates Foundation to help secure the approval of African governments to allow field testing of genetically modified banana, rice, sorghum and cassava plants.

A rash of magazine ads for Monsanto in recent months also links the global food crisis with the potential of technology to solve it. But some governments are uneasy about the implications of crops like GM corn, which was banned in Germany this year.

A key piece of legislation, the Global Food Security Act of 2009 S.384 sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar, would authorize appropriations through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, stimulate rural economies, and improve emergency response to food crises.

Part of the bill includes a provision to "include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology."

That clause is sparking vocal opposition by groups including Food First, the National Family Farm Coalition, Organic Consumers Association, Rainforest Action Network and others who say the bill's intentions are good but the approach is wrong.

"While the intentions behind the Global Food Security Act may be laudable, the question is whether poorer farmers left behind by the last Green Revolution will again be swept aside by a top-down approach that benefits mostly transnational corporations," said Andrew Kang Bartlett of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Instead, the coalition supports a number of actions to address the food crisis, including
regulating commodity futures markets to end excessive speculation, halting growth of industrial crops for fuel in developing countries, stabilizing commodity prices through food reserves, setting fair regional and global trade agreements and directing efforts toward ecological farming practices.

DonorsChoose.org, one of a growing number of online charities that solicit help directly from the public, received a boost today from the Gates Foundation.

A $4.1 million Gates Foundation grant will help DonorsChoose fund half the cost of classroom projects developed by teachers to help students in low income families get ready for college.

Using an online model similar to Kiva.org, DonorsChoose lets teachers describe their projects, and individuals browsing the site can decide whether to support them. DonorsChoose then distributes the supplies to the schools.

TV personality Stephen Colbert was around to "moderate" the event, keeping the potentially vehement charity announcement from becoming too extreme.

JASON DECROW / ASSOCIATED PRESS

TV personality Stephen Colbert serves on the board of DonorsChoose.org when he's not running for president, making ice cream or warding off marauding animals.

"As I endeavor to protect our children from bears, DonorsChoose.org is protecting public school kids from classrooms that lack the materials necessary to rigorously prepare them for college," Colbert said. He's a board member of DonorsChoose.org. But considering the organization has 13 other board members and 26 advisers, he's really not that special.

Schools in the Seattle area are using the online tool to raise money for specific projects.

A class in South Seattle raised $561 from 24 donors on the site after requesting donations for "science books and videos about electricity and Benjamin Franklin, as well as an electricity poster and DC-volt meter for 30 young scientists."

The teacher said she aims to integrate science and social studies using a science kit and lessons about Franklin and literacy, describing her 4th grade class in a school with high poverty rates where "many of us are new to the United States and almost all of us are new to science."

Donors, teachers and students interact in forums on the Web site. A donor named Sara wrote: "I gave to this project because I grew up going to school in south Seattle. I know it isn't the most perfect place, but I love the diversity there."

Under the "Double Your Impact" initiative funded by Gates, requests that promote college-readiness will be eligible for 50 percent funding from DonorsChoose. Projects would include things like student trips to college campuses, classroom books and SAT/ACT preparation materials.

So far, 88,000 public and charter school teachers have used DonorsChoose to raise more than $30 million for books, art supplies, technology and other materials.

Vicki Phillips, director of education at the Gates Foundation, said she hopes the partnership will give individual donors an added incentive to support projects to see them fully funded.

Colbert had one burning question for Phillips: "Does Bill Gates ever talk about me?"

UPDATE: The project mentioned above, at Thurgood Marshall Elementary, received 12 donations in the last 24 hours and is now fully funded.

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

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.

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.

What a difference a decade makes. One of the companies that sued South Africa to block distribution of low-cost drugs to fight AIDS now says it's cutting drug prices and funding health clinics in poor countries.

Last week drug maker GlaxoSmithKline said it would slash prices to the 50 poorest countries in the world and use 20 percent of its profits from them to build health clinics. Prices for the poorest countries would be no higher than 25 percent of the price in developed countries, CEO Andrew Witty said.

GSK's revenue from those countries is about $43 million a year, so it would generate $1.5 million to $2.5 million for the clinics, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Witty proposed that drug companies and non-profits create a common pool for intellectual property, donating patents related to neglected tropical diseases to speed development of new drugs.

It's an interesting model that might apply in other cases where patents on technology make prices prohibitively expensive. GSK is the company with the most advanced vaccine candidate for malaria, a project backed by the Gates Foundation.

On Friday, GSK said it would not donate patents on HIV drugs, however, because they're sold at not-for-profit prices and there is enough competition to drive innovation.

Doctors Without Borders responded today: Thanks for the Valentine; now show us some real love.

The group welcomed GSK's new stance, saying patent pools offer new ways to stimulate research, but added that more details are needed about licensing terms and "promises now need to be turned into action."

GSK must include in its patent pool drugs for HIV, a field where the gap between what is needed and what is available is large, Doctors Without Borders contends.

A bit of history: GSK was among a group of 39 pharmaceutical companies that sued the government of South Africa in 1998 for enacting an amendment to WTO rules, which allowed it access generic versions of patented HIV drugs. The companies later dropped the suit , facing international public pressure.

But the impact of trade policies on disease remains an ongoing issue, says Health Alliance International, a non-profit based at the University of Washington that addresses disparities in health.

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.

A public interest group in Washington is questioning whether the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation should support an organization mapping broadband Internet access in parts of the U.S., calling the organization a front for the telecom industry.

The foundation is giving the non-profit organization Connected Nation more than $6 million to help states "organize and host a broadband summit to gather and activate public library leaders, state and local officials, and other influencers who can support broadband Internet in libraries throughout each state," according to the grant announcement.

But Connected Nation, backed by telecom giants like AT&T and BellSouth, hasn't achieved any meaningful results, and the state of Kentucky pulled its funding from the group, says Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge. He says Connected Nation's opponents are challenging "the semi-sacred status of the public-private partnership."

According to this story from North Carolina, critics say telecom providers don't want to provide too clear a picture of what services are available "because it would be unflattering, showing disparities in race and income, and invite further regulation of the industry."

Bunny Sanders, mayor of a tiny coastal town in the state, is quoted calling for an independent group to produce the data:

"If you accept educated guesses or information controlled by the carriers, there are communities that will be left out," she said. "More than likely they will be remote, rural, sparsely populated poor communities which will not produce profits for the carriers. Communities like where I live."

A scathing rebuttal is posted here.