Lucy Bernholz and the disrupting philanthropy team say: Information networks—the Internet primarily, and increasingly SMS (text-messaging) and 3G (smart-phone) cell phone technologies—are overturning core practices of philanthropic foundations and individuals. Enormous databases and powerful new visualization tools can be accessed instantly by anyone, at any time. A decade of experimentation in online giving, social enterprise, and collaboration has brought us to a place from which innovation around enterprise forms, governance, and finance will only accelerate.

Read more here: Disrupting Philanthropy online.

Jean Butzen writes: There has been so much discussion about the push to merge nonprofits, that I thought it be good to shift the focus to another form of strategic integration: Shared Service Alliances, or what some people refer to as management service organizations.

Read More at Stanford Social Innovation Review: Creatively Combining The Back Office: A Series on Shared Service Alliances.

Museums Special Section – In Tough Times, Turning to the Web to Raise Funds – NYTimes.com.

The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: the victims are re-imagined as agents who supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates the text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use this information to target the most pressing problems.

But Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has long been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its ecosystem of universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less rather than on selling you new and improved stuff. And so bright people from Nairobi and New Delhi and Nanjing can today take their place at the leading edge of industries from cellphones to banking to car making.

Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it. Because Kenya is poor, with computers out of reach for many, Ushahidi made its system accessible by cellphones. Because Ushahidi had no venture capitalists backing it, it had to use open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for their own projects.

Ushahidi remixes can be found all over the Internet. They have been used in India to monitor elections; in Africa to report medicine shortages; in the Middle East to collect reports of wartime violence; and in Washington, where The Washington Post built an Ushahidi-powered site called “Snowmageddon” to map road blockages and the location of available plows.

via Currents – Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd – NYTimes.com.

Over $3 Million Available for Businesses and Nonprofits to Finance Energy Improvements

CONCORD, NH — New Hampshire businesses and nonprofit organizations are invited to submit proposals for low-interest loans for energy-efficiency improvements and renewable-energy projects.

The Enterprise Energy Fund was created by a $3.5-million award to the Community Development Finance Authority (CDFA) by the Office of Energy and Planning‘s State Energy Program, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The fund is a low-interest loan and grant program to help finance energy improvements in buildings owned or leased by small, medium, and large businesses and nonprofits statewide.

Of the $3.5 million, $2.5 million will go to large commercial businesses and nonprofits. The remaining $1 million will be administered by CDFA’s partner organization, the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, for small commercial businesses and nonprofits.

The majority of the funds will be loaned to businesses and nonprofits to help them reduce their energy costs and consumption. The loans will range from $10,000 to $500,000, with interest rates ranging between two and four percent.

A small portion of the fund will pay for energy audits, provide down payments on energy efficiency projects to businesses and to nonprofits that provide essential services and have been hardest hit by the recession, leverage significant private sector funds, and encourage investments in renewable energy.

See the full press release from CDFA here.

An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.

via Retirees Trade Work for Rent at Cash-Poor Parks – NYTimes.com.

Reinventing the wheel for clean energy:

Last year Melbourne’s iconic Southern Star Observation Wheel found a sad turn when it had to be shut down due to cracks and buckling caused by the intense summer heat. The $100 million wheel has since been decommissioned, but that hasn’t stopped designers from thinking about what to do next with the landmark. So why reinvent the wheel you ask? Because it could be transformed into an energy-generating windmill outfitted with solar sails!

Read more at Inhabitat: Melbourne’s Observation Wheel gets a Futuristic Green Makeover.

…Longer term, say many nonprofits, the decline in donations to charities appears likely to continue. The sector’s difficulties are re-awakening a touchy debate among some leaders in the nonprofit world over whether the economic prosperity of the past few decades has spawned an excess of nonprofits.

With the bar to getting tax-exempt status low, the number of nonprofits registered with the Internal Revenue Service doubled to 1.5 million organizations, employing about 12 million people, or 10% of America’s work force, over the past 15 years. Organizations range in size and substance, from the 1,300 local United Way charities to the Grand Canyon Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Inc., whose members dress in drag to raise funds for HIV/AIDS.

“There were too many poorly performing nonprofits,” says Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. “There were very many niche nonprofits devoted to small slices of a problem and they needed to be merged.”

With growing demand for a declining supply of donation dollars, some donors are arguing that there are too many organizations providing similar services. Merging or collaborating may allow them to more effectively solve the problems they aim to address.

Read more at Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate – WSJ.com.

…Technology … has become the lifeblood of new philanthropic networks, and has begun to unleash the power of aggregated individual donors and activists. Technologies are changing how philanthropists find and share information, how they communicate with each other, their grantees, the public, and their enterprise partners, and how they measure their work and deploy their resources.

They do an excellent job laying out current activity in emerging technology in philanthropy. Makes me want to track next the stories how these tactics move social change farther, faster than the knee-to-knee, centralized models that the banks and the hospitals and media and news have already seen sift away.

Get the report here on Scribd or follow the discussion on Lucy’s blog Philanthropy 2173.

Not everyone has a large house to trade or a large sum of money to donate but look around you—we have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information—in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place. Witness the recent example of clothing retailers like H&M deliberately mutilating and tossing unsold clothes in the trash. Many experts in retail concede that the practice is not uncommon—for some unfathomable “economic” reason it makes more sense to destroy clothes than to release them into a local community. The situation is even worse when it comes to food. We over-produce and waste a lot of it. According to the USDA, just over a quarter of America’s food — about 25.9 million tons — gets thrown into the garbage can every year. University of Arizona estimates that the number is closer to 50 percent. The country’s supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores alone throw out 27 million tons between them every year (representing $30 billion of wasted food). This is why the U.N. World Food Program says the total food surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy “every empty stomach” in Africa. How about empty stomachs in our own communities?

Odessa to the Future» Blog Archive » Crowdsourcing Abundance or “Screw’ em, Let’s Do This Ourselves”.