Charity vs Social Lending

Hello all..

I was looking at more options on how and where we all as team can contribute. There seem to be too many directions we can take and none less significant than the other.

I talked about Micro Financing in my last post and was researching more on what that channel brings us and if it were to be an effective tool.

That led me to "Charity vs Social Lending".

'Social Lending' concept is fundamentally against our wishful thinking of NOT making money out of a noble cause. But it did bring in few interesting angles to look at - Accountability and - Responsibility of the tasks/actions we intend to perform; how will this sustain over the long term. ( Please read my Matt Damon post few weeks back on what he does on these issues)

http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/new-micro-lending-model-by-a-former-infosys-employee/1/16820.html

Its been difficult for us lately to identify the right recipients. Ideally we want to become an organization (or  look for one mean while) where you can interact with the person you want to work with and help them direct.
There are few organizations (http://www.kiva.org/) which does that but unfortunately our RBI has some stringent rules where in India is not listed as country they can support.

I ran into http://www.micrograam.com/ which provides us the same interface as we talked about earlier but at a fee. We can waive our profits for the loans we give but there still would be some money these NGO's will make on the interests paid back from the recipients.

Thought i will share this with you and see how you all feel about it. We need to diversify our efforts as well until we find something close to heart and are very comfortable doing it all the time.

More later.

Interesting article opening up few more ideas!

"Your life should be about finding the intersection of the world's greatest need and your greatest passion"

Hello all..


Hopefully you guys had time to think more about how we want to proceed with "Our-Share". I couldn't spend as much as i wanted to.


I was searching through the web to identify on what all kinds of NGO's we have out there in India and how can we establish an official charity down the lane when we all decide on it.


During this process, i recalled watching a program over a year ago about Matt Damon and his efforts to provide clean water and sanitation (water.org) for the under privileged in places like Africa and India.


I came across a latest article on Fast Company and its very informative and opened up few new ideas ( Micro Financing, how its helps sustain the initial effort from an aid agency) something i am very interested to learn more about for future.

Please take few mins to read through it
"http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/157/can-this-man-save-this-girl"


Another FYI links about NGO's listings in India
http://www.ngoinindia.org/


Will keep you updated on anything i new i can find and please you do the same to share any new ideas we all can assimilate and then try to implement


Regards,
@panthula