#BlogActionDay 2012: The Power of We – Crowd-Sourced Funding

When you think about organizations receiving funding from a large number of people, some of whom donate very small amounts, you typically think of two scenarios – political parties and large charities.

And certainly, those two types of organizations have greatly benefited from the advent of social media, where they can solicit donations from targeted groups of individuals where they congregate online. Individual donation pages set up by everyone from walkers in support of breast cancer research to triathletes training to compete on behalf of blood cancer prevention, detection and treatment.

Donations (Photo credit: Matthew Burpee)

. My daughter Kate, a public school teacher in inner-city Philadelphia twice leveraged DonorsChoose.org to fund first basic equipment (and when I say basic I mean bats, gloves and even the bases) for a girl’s softball team she had volunteered to coach at her school which lacked its own means to support, and again to take her students to see the documentary ‘The Bully Project – 1 Million Kids’ in hopes of bettering their lives today and building better citizens for tomorrow  Social Media now has Kickstarter.com, a way to invest in new start-up companies. I even helped fund getting clean water in Africa via CharityWater.org and co-funded the recent Broadway revival of ‘Godspell’.

So the ‘”Power of We” is strong, wide-ranging, and helps bring things to life for philanthropy and for-profit projects alike.

Give a little to the project of your choice — you know you should.