Seth Godin Wants You To Decide!

I liked what Seth was saying in his video, but it isn't something that I haven't heard before. If I understand him correctly, the Acumen fund is attempting to change the way that world approaches the poor and to start an economic system that includes growth on both ends, and not just siphoning money into the bottomless pit of a failing economy. This definitely seems to me to be an extremely good idea, because it is clear that our current version of helping the poor, while being well meaning, isn't really inspiring any long term change. Local sales and small investing is a really good idea, and I've actually been involved with some of the different projects that try to help do these things.

The first thing I became involved in was through the Vlogbrothers, a youtube channel that is committed to fighting worldsuck and increasing the nerdtasticness of the world. (That is almost a direct quote.) Every December, they have a thing called The Project For Awesome, which is basically where they try to get their entire internet community together and do some sort of charity work in a far away part of the world. A couple of websites tat really embody what Seth Godin was talking about are Kiva.org and Heifer.org. The first one is where you can invest a certain amount of money into a small business that then gives them about a year to get off the ground and pay back the loans that they received earlier. The second website is when you can donate a couple of animals or trees to a family and they are then obligated to share the offspring of those gifts with other members of their community, giving them a source of permanent income and a way of expanding their circle of influence. Kiva.org is a little more affordable for me because you only have to donate a portion of the loan cost, but I think both of them are good ideas and if we had more companies like that, we could probably be a lot farther along in solving our poverty problem.