Global Giving

I recently discovered Global Giving (www.globalgiving.com) which describes itself as "a marketplace for goodness" - where you can browse ways to help others around the world, pick the ones you are most passionate about, and support the solution.

Global Giving's mission is to build an efficient, open, thriving marketplace that connects people who have community and world-changing ideas with people who can support them. And as far as I can tell it’s delivering in spades.

In 1997, World Bank executives Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle were asked to develop innovative ways to combat poverty. They created the Bank's Development Marketplace, a first-of-its-kind event where people from around the world competed for World Bank funds. The event's success unveiled the enormous potential of a global marketplace for philanthropy, and participants asked for a real marketplace that was open year round and operated virtually. Mari and Dennis saw the brilliance of this idea, left the World Bank and launched GlobalGiving.

In addition to finding interesting projects to support, I've enjoyed finding out about new ideas and approaches to a range of pressing public interests issues.

But above all Global Giving is harnessing the power of the Internet to put vitally important social and environmental important projects in touch with much needed supporters.

Global Giving's approach makes marketing and fundraising for small organizations more cost effective which has the added benefit of ensuring that even more of supporters vital funds goes directly to the project they're interested in.

Donor or do-gooder I'd encourage you to have a look at Global Giving.

More information at www.globalgiving.com