World Statistics Day Energy Quiz

Paul Kedrosky pointed me to this energy statistics quiz from the Energy Information Administration.

I scored 18/20, missing on questions 3 & 4 (duoh!).

See how well you do: US Energy Information Administration Energy Quiz

Did you know there was such a thing as World Statistics Day?

LEED, BIM and Smart in the Land of Green Opportunity

I have a guest post today on constructionlawva.com  It starts out like this:

“LEED buildings are great, until the tenant moves in,” the head of a large, international construction company once said to me.  “Once the tenant moves in, the environmental sustainability of the building goes out the window.”The Green Skeptic on constructionlawva.com, Thoughts on the construction landscape from Christopher G. Hill, lawyer, LEED AP and member of the Virginia Legal Elite in Construction Law, Feb 2010

To read the whole article, go here: http://bit.ly/bADZ7R

 

 

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• LEED Is Driving Me Crazy (jamesondetweiler.com)
• Can Heritage Buildings Be Called Green? (treehugger.com)
• What Owners Look for in Green Building and Why Contractors Should Care (constructionlawva.com)
• "Cleaner, Greener: LEED-Alternative Green Building Code Adopted Statewide" and related posts (sf.curbed.com)

Innovation: Dave Eggers and his TED Wish for Engaging with Local Public Schools

Stop what you are doing right now and take 20 minutes to watch this very inspiring talk by 2008 TED Prize winner and author Dave Eggers. His wish? That the TED community personally, creatively engage with local public schools.

With charateristic aplomb and earnestness, Eggers talks about "how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don't need to go that far, he reminds us -- it's as simple as asking a teacher 'How can I help?' He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School."



Thanks to Paul Pedrosky at Infectious Greed for alerting me to the posting of the video.

[Note: Initially, I can't seem to get the embedding code to work, so here is a link to the page on TED.com: Eggers @ TED]

Microfinance: Plural India Focusing on Micro-Small-Medium Enterprise Development

I had lunch today at TERI with Shivendra Sharma, formerly of PlaNet Finance and now Founder of Plural India, which will include a consulting group, foundation, and educational services for small, medium, and microenterprises.

The purpose behind Plural is "to stimulate new markets by reducing information asymmetries and creating conditions conducive for open-market approaches to work in an inclusive manner."

At PlaNet Finance India, Shivendra was the brainchild behind Small Change, the magazine dedicated to connecting microbusiness stakeholders globally and highlighting the diversity of the microeconomy.

Now with Plural he's launched a monthly eMagazine called Pluralist. The first issue came out today and focuses on the emerging influence of commercial banking and finance institutions in the microfinance space. To obtain a copy, write Shivendra at: shiv@pluralindia.in

In December, Plural announced the first distance learning course in Microfinance, called "Microfinance Passport." Microfinance Passport is a four-month course for those interested in the emergent field of microfinance. You can learn more about the course by following the smart link above. The first series is now completely subscribed, but they'll be offering a second round in the summer.

Social Entrepreneurs: Ashoka North America and Travel to India May Slow My Posts, Maybe

I'm heading to India today after 24 hours in Miami.

Here in Miami we celebrated the new crop of Ashoka North America Fellows, leading social entrepreneurs from the US, Canada, and Mexico/Central America in the fields of social financial services, youth empowerment, the envrionment, and economic development. An awesome and insipiring crew.

Here is the full list of Fellows welcomed in a ceremony last night hosted by the Knight Foundation:

• Amy Bank, Puntos de Encuentro – Using mass media to help women and youth discuss and defend human rights (Managua, Nicaragua and San Francisco, California)
• Bruce Cahan, Urban Logic, Inc. – Adding social values to lending and spending (Palo Alto, California)
• Oona Chatterjee, Make the Road New York – Uniting poor communities to create the change they seek (Brooklyn, New York)
• Gerald Chertavian, Year Up – Placing young urban adults and corporate America on a shared path to success (Boston, Massachusetts)
• Eric Dawson, Peace Games – Bringing children and their schools a shared purpose: leading the way to peace (Boston, Massachusetts)
• Alisa del Tufo, Threshold Collaborative – Enabling communities to help troubled families heal (North Bennington, Vermont)
• Jonah Edelman, Stand for Children – Raising voices and casting ballots for those too young to vote (Portland, Oregon)
• William F. Foote (Global Fellow), Root Capital – Opening global markets to small producers by redefining their investment value (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
• Rosanne Haggerty (Senior Fellow), Common Ground – Restoring buildings and rebuilding lives to end homelessness (New York, New York)
• Kathryn Hall-Trujillo, Birthing Project USA – Bringing women of color together to nurture young moms and their babies (Taos, New Mexico, and Sacramento, California)
• Farhana Huq, C.E.O. Women (Creating Economic Opportunities for Women) – Propelling immigrant women into leading roles in business and life (Oakland, California)
• Esther Lardent (Senior Fellow), The Pro Bono Institute – Integrating civic engagement into the practice of law (Washington, DC)
• Peter Nares (Senior Fellow), Social and Enterprise Development Innovations – Opening the way to replace poverty with economic independence worldwide (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
• Abelardo Palma, Formación y Capacitación, A.C. – Preserving the culture and identity of indigenous children through bilingual education (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México)
• Billy Parish, Energy Action Coalition/The Dream Reborn – Employing youth and the underserved in greening our planet (Flagstaff, Arizona)
• Sidney Ribaux, Équiterre – Creating environmentally and socially sustainable communities (Montréal, Quebéc, Canada)
• Daniel Ross, Nuestras Raíces – Transplanting knowledge and culture to create jobs, guide youth, and renew urban America (Holyoke, Massachusetts)
• Omar Rodríguez, Solano Edumar – Protecting Costa Rica’s ocean environment through education and community involvement (Puntarenas, Costa Rica)
• Jayne Stoyles, Canadian Centre for International Justice – Guaranteeing that human rights abusers are brought to justice anywhere in the world (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
• Atsumasa Tochisako (Global Fellow), Microfinance International Corporation – Putting global banking to work for immigrants and their homelands (Washington, DC)
• Michel Venne, Institut du Nouveau Monde – Reinventing the public forum as a platform for citizen action (Montréal, Quebéc, Canada)

I am heading to India for a selection panel and to visit some of our environment-focused entrepreneurs over the next two weeks. I hope to continue my posts from that wired country, but I may be more sporadic than usual.

Philanthropy 2.0: DonorsChoose on Wallstrip!

What happens when two of my favorite web gems come together?

Take a look as the lovely Lindsay Campbell of Wallstrip sits down with heartthrob handsome Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org. Charles does a fantastic job telling the story of how DonorsChoose came about and why it's successful. His enthusiasm is infectious and Lindsay, as only the best talk show hosts do, does a great job letting him shine.

I was so moved, I was the first to click the donate button on the Wallstrip Challenge. And partially funded a project in Brooklyn called "iPod as a Prize for Investing Guru," where 8th graders are learning how the stock market works by receiving a hypothetical $100,000 to "invest" over the course of the next six months.



Read more about my own recent experience with DonorsChoose: Green Skeptic Gives

You can watch Wallstrip daily from my sidebar below, right.

(Disclosure: Charles Best is an Ashoka Fellow; I currently work for Ashoka. Further disclosure: long on Wallstrip; long on DonorsChoose.)

(Updated with embedding fixed - thanks, Adam!)

Philanthropy: DonorsChoose.org, a gift that keeps giving

Philanthropy can be a thing of beauty when it goes well. The donor is pleased to make a contribution to a worthy cause, those in need are helped directly, and an efficient market is created around an exchange of values.

I recently had such an experience with an innovative new approach to philanthropy called DonorsChoose.org. (In the interest of full disclosure, DonorsChoose founder Charles Best is an Ashoka Fellow and, while I recently went to work for Ashoka, I did not have any role in selecting Charles as a Fellow.)

My story goes like this: Charles came up with a new way to reach a potential new audience on line, blog readers. He approached some of the top bloggers in the U.S. and asked that they post a challenge to their readers during the month of October.

The challenge also had a competitive aspect, as the top bloggers were competing with one another to reach more readers and get them to take action. Support your favorite blogger by donating to a project on their list, thereby contributing to the cause, but also helping the blogger beat the other guy.

I'm a regular reader and fan of fellow blogger Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures VC, whose blog A VC is on my Google Reader feed. Of course I wanted to help him beat the competition, and I have been curious about DonorsChoose for some time.

So, when his challenge was posted, I followed the link to Fred's DonorsChoose Challenge page and found a project I could get behind, "An Invite to Write." A teacher in a rural North Carolina school, located between Hickory and Boone, wrote the proposal:

"I teach 21 3rd graders at Sawmills Elementary School. Forty percent of my third graders are considered at-risk students in reading/writing," she wrote. "I am currently attending ASU to earn a Master's Degree in Reading Education. I would like to make writing more enjoyable for my students as well as myself! In my graduate classes, I am learning new and exciting ways to integrate writing into all areas of the curriculum."

The need? To create a writing station "in our classroom which will hopefully "invite my students to write." I would like for the students to be able to write letters, compose poems, or go to the station to write freely in their journals. In the writing station, the students would have access to construction paper, envelopes, stationary, colored pencils, pens, pencils, erasers, etc."

Her idea was to prepare these students for the statewide reading test they must pass in 4th grade. "More importantly," she wrote, "it is my goal to help my students become better writers, and to instill a love for writing.

As a writer, this appealed to me right away. It's also a place I'm familiar with because my mother-in-law lives about an hour from there.

The request? The cost of an easel on wheels, a tabletop writing center and a classroom mailbox is $391, including shipping and fulfillment. My $100 contribution would help them get towards their goal, clearly having an impact. (The goal was met six days later.)

My gift had an immediate impact. I felt good and Fred was on his way to meeting his challenge and winning lunch with Jerry Yang of Yahoo. (You can read more about that story, and what Fred did with that lunch, here.)

I received a prompt receipt and thanks for my contribution; very efficiently handled by DonorsChoose.

This would have been a nice story if it stopped there. But it didn't.

A few days ago, I received an email in response to my donation. One of the DonorsChoose sponsors of the Blogger Challenge had provided a gift certificate worth $100 for me to apply to another project.

This time, we searched for a project closer to home, in Philadelphia. We found one called "Making Science Come to Life," a subject my son loves. The school is in North Philly and the request came from an 8th Grade science teacher who wanted to equip her new science lab with materials: 8 dissection instrument sets, sorting trays, a periodic table poster, and 7 rocks and minerals sets. Very cool.

But that’s not all, when we went to make the donation last night, we found the project was 85% of the way toward its goal, meaning our $100 gift certificate could complete the funding!

In other words, my original contribution was leveraged three times: 1.) funding the first project; 2.) helping (however modestly) Fred rise to the Challenge and get the Jerry Yang lunch (and you have to read about what he did with it -- awesome; and 3.) funding this science project in North Philly. Wow.

I can't express how this makes me feel. My gift was leveraged, the projects are funded, the teachers will inspire their students, and students in two classrooms will have a better educational experience this year. Who knows? Some of the students may become writers or scientists, as a result.

An efficient market for philanthropy recognizes that donor-to-recipient exchanges are not just about cash contributions or transactions; they are an exchange of value and values. Kudos to DonorsChoose for making this possible -- and to Fred for rising to the challenge.

DonorsChoose is now supporting public schools in all 50 states. You can even create a Gift Registry, as I've done to encourage family and friends to give a gift that keeps giving.

This holiday season, consider donating through DonorsChoose.org. You won't regret it.