Editor’s note: Below you’ll find a link to Kiva.org’s 2011 annual report. Started only in 2005, any person (me included) can go onto this site and “connect” to a third world entrepreneur to whom they wish to lend money which, over time, is paid back. All candidates are the very, very poor and the average loan is about $400. Using this method, they lent almost $100 million in ’11, their sixth year in “social business.” Read the whole report if I’ve piqued your interest. They are amazing.

Finding Your Funding Model” by Peter Kim, Gail Perreault, & William Foster http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/finding_your_funding_model

Editor’s note: The video link below takes a look at how StudentMentor.org is helping college students achieve their dreams. StudentMentor.org, a ground-breaking national mentoring organization, has been invited to The White House to meet the President and talk to White House officials about the critical issue of college completion and career readiness.

Editor’s Note: The following article, written by Alex Shahidi and passed on to me by my partner, Jake Crocker, is an interesting take on long-term secular trends in the U.S. stock market. It looks at the financial markets in terms of decades and thus reminds you to focus on forest as opposed to the trees. This is certainly important in the world of investing as well as mission building in the non-profit world.

Editor’s Note: Ever since hearing a presentation 20 years ago from a surgeon who said “30% of your health is chance (heredity), 70% is choice (how you treat your body and mind) this issue has interested me greatly. I’m not a health nut but I strive to do more good to my body than bad. This article, given me by my friend, Brad Roller, is alarming but in a very helpful way, in my view. Hope you enjoy.

Editor’s Note: Somehow this article from 16 months ago got lost in my clippings file and yet is still worth publishing. It’s a brief Charlie Rose interview with two academics and two journalists. It’s a great clip in my view of what seems to me to be an American society issue – the bifurcation of incomes.

Editor’s Note: The company referenced in the article below “Investing in the Bottom of the Ladder,” by Jody Heymann, demonstrates that for-profit companies can do better by paying and treating their lowest paid employees better. The two companies I’ve been most directly involved in are primarily impacted by their lowest paid workers (WorkPlace Media and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers). In fact, over 350 of our 400 workers live on the margins. Like Great Little Box, it seems obvious to us that the better your treat your “lowest rung of the ladder” employee, the greater your overall success – financially and societally.

http://www.capitalidea.org/downloads/pdfs/CI_one_page.pdf

Editor’s note:  Thanks to my good friend and article-watcher, Ron Dimattia, for passing this onto me.  I’ve never been a big Clinton fan and yet his point of “charity” alone no longer making sense is one I subscribe to wholeheartedly.  And the article is well-written and to the point.  

Editor’s note: You’ll have to register on the McKinsey site to finish reading this but it’s free and well worth the read. Every single person I know faces information overload in one way or another. I hope you are working your way out of it, just as I have been. Getting out of the slow-down that multi-tasking can cause in your work is as difficult yet simple as meditation. That is, as the article states: “find time to focus, filter out the unimportant, forget about work every now and then. The holy grail, of course, is to retain the benefits of connectivity without letting it distract us too much.”