There are communities around the world in need of homes, jobs, and facilities such as daycare. You want to help, but don’t want to give money away. Is it possible to still help? Yes!

Blending Financial and Social Returns

For over 10 years, Calvert Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, has been working to make community investment a safe and logical option for all investors seeking to make a positive social impact. We focus on using investment capital, rather than conventional philanthropy, to create a sustainable, scalable model that enables nonprofit organizations and social enterprises to address critical social problems.

The Calvert Foundation

My longtime freind Margaret Roach and sometime creative collaborator launched open Your hands project a couple of years ago and has built a website to follow the project:

Open Your Hands - Nepal

JOIN YOUR HANDS WITH OURS
You, too, can join the circle. Find out how you can make a difference by opening your hands to the children of Birta Deurali, Nepal, and nearby communities, as those listed below have to date. Open Your Hands’ Federal 501(c) (3) charitable status is pending approval, so we regret that at this time your contributions are not tax-deductible. Email us at openyourhandsinc at gmail dot com to indicate your interest and we will happily contact you when our application is approved, and new projects are being funded. Link to site Here.

FINCA

• The mission of FINCA International
  is to provide financial services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs so they can create jobs, build assets and improve their standard of living.

• The vision of FINCA International
  is to become the leading global microfinance institution by providing financial services to more than one million clients annually by 2010, while operating with the highest commercial principles of performance, transparency and sustainability.

• FINCA today reaches 700,000 clients in 21 countries.
  But the scope of global poverty compels us all to do more. At the beginning of the new century, the nations of the world agreed to work toward eight Millennium Development Goals that would eliminate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

Kiva

Loan to the Working Poor

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals in need of funding – not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entreprenuer on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.