Archive for Haiti
The CauseWired Roundup
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Global Social Benefit Incubator™ Alumni will soon be featured in the Social Entrepreneur API alongside social entrepreneurs who have received fellowship and awards from Civic Ventures, the Draper Richards Foundation, PopTech, the Schwab Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation.
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What’s unfolding in Haiti , as search-and-rescue is evolving into the challenge of managing the distribution of food and water, getting people into safe spaces, reconnecting them with their lost family and friends, and providing some sort of vision for the days and months ahead, bears out the critical importance of a skilled wrangling of information, especially when so much of life’s more tangible things have been upended. The thing is, wrangling information just also happens to be one of the things that modern technologists are best at.
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One of the most interesting projects that has emerged during the response to the earthquake in Haiti is Ushahidi, a free and open source platform that “allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline.” In short, the goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
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Shocking photos from Haiti sparked an outpouring of donations—but why do Americans only give when they see the drama unfold on TV? Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of Philanthrocapitalism, on the nature of sympathy.
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Because more mergers simply make sense: “This week Mobilize.org announced it would acquire the assets, staff and programs of Generation Engage. In some ways, it’s surprising to see this merger because it’s not something done every day. In other ways, it’s not surprising at all.”
GlobalGiving Founder on Haiti: ‘When You’re Poor, Everything Becomes Harder to Recover From’
As the incredible depth of devastation in Haiti became apparent yesterday, the response online grew rapidly. Haiti and various related topics trended all day on Twitter,blogs and websites were filled with links to nonprofits working in Haiti, and ubiquitous calls for cell phone text-to-give campaigns flooded the RSS streams. Like others, I turned to an online-based organization whose work I know and whose promise to get aid to those in need quickly – and effectively – I trusted.
GlobalGiving has been a marketplace for charitable projects since 1997 and has a history of supporting programs on health, poverty, agriculture and the environment in Haiti – and the site swung into action yesterday, working with key on-the-ground partners to rush medical supplies and emergency aid to the stricken nation. As the GlobalGiving team raced to direct resources to Haiti, I spoke briefly with Mari Kuraishi, the co-founder and president.
What’s GlobalGiving’s perspective on what Haiti faces during these terrible days?
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and in 2009 ranked 149th out of 182 countries according to the UN’s human development report. That’s to say that one in five Haitian children is underweight for their age and GDP per capita is $1,155—2.5% of US GDP per capita ($45,592). This is a country that is least able to recover from a natural disaster like a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. On the one hand that seems obvious. When you’re poor, everything becomes harder to recover from, because you just don’t have any slack in the system.
What do you think philanthropy’s role will be?
We don’t know the scale of the losses yet in Haiti. While it’s impossible to compare, the cost of the 1995 Kobe earthquake (a 7.3 earthquake) has been estimated at $100b in property and infrastructure damage. Human losses in Japan were 6,400 killed and 15,000 injured. The cost of recovery in Kobe? As of 2006, $3b in insurance losses, and $9b in long-term private finance to rebuild.
Philanthropy and nonprofit management expert Susan Carey Dempsey is the editor-in-chief of onPhilanthropy.com. 
Veteran consultant, journalist and entrepreneur Tom Watson is the author of CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, a new book about online social activism. 
Social media and philanthropy evaluation expert Allison Fine is the author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. 
Veteran development consultant Stephen Manzi is a recognized national leader in nonprofit management and fundraising strategy. 
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