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.

Most Haitians don’t have access to formal credit markets—even at a fraction of the Kobe earthquake costs (huge amounts of productive economic assets were destroyed in the Kobe earthquake), the resources they need will not be coming from the capital markets. Philanthropy and official foreign assistance will have to fill the gap for Haiti. And given the weakness of the government in Haiti, I think official foreign assistance can only go so far to help—the role of NGOs becomes even more important. That’s where I think the generosity of the American public and the power of NGOS that have long experience in Haiti, from Partners in Health to the Lambi Fund, will come into play.

How can the outpouring of online concern, donations, and activism translate into real relief on the ground?

At GlobalGiving we’ve dealt with massive disasters like the tsunami in 2004, and more localized disasters like the Szechuan earthquake in 2008. We’ve observed that disasters, more than any other event, mobilizes a huge swath of the American public to give. What’s more corporate partners of ours—from Liquidnet to Gap to Nike to Hasbro have all responded immediately that they will match donations, some for their employees, others for the public in general. So I have high hopes. As of 2pm today (Jan. 13), we were coming up close on matching the number of donations on the first day of the China earthquake disaster.

Longer term we MUST focus on increasing resilience of the poorest countries to disasters like this. While earthquakes are not climate change induced, we know that climate change will increase the frequency of weather related disasters. And it turns out that while it’s possible to invest to a certain extent in “disaster preparedness,” actually one of the most important things you can do is invest in female empowerment, specifically education.

To this point, David Wheeler at the Center for Global Development has just published a very interesting paper that touches on extreme weather events and countries’ ability to adapt to or recover from them. The fact is that the cost of a disaster is not just borne by a country in the abstract, they are borne by real people. And data from weather related disasters suggests that women suffer disproportionately from natural disasters—David quotes Oxfam pointing out that “In the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone … four times more women died than men.”

What can we – should we – learn from this?

Haiti has long been a “fragile” state. We’ve known this for a long time. We also could have known, if we’d thought about it, that it was incredibly vulnerable to external shocks precisely because its has so little slack in the system. It’s a time bomb that’s gone off, and honestly, it’s not the only one. All the climate scientists tell us that extreme events will increase—so I think while the current disaster is a human tragedy that the world will be tested to respond to in anything resembling a timely fashion, this should be a wake up call to look into what we can do to defuse future time bombs.

To assist Haitians in their hour of need, please visit:
http://www.globalgiving.org/haiti-earthquake/

Or see onPhilanthropy’s round-up of charitable relief efforts:
http://www.onphilanthropy.com/

But if you’re not, the discussion has already started – and your ideas are most welcome.

Thanks to Social Edge, the Skoll Foundation’s online community for social entrepreneurs, we’ve been busily talking about “open source giving” over the past two weeks. I set up the discussion to focus on this question: “So how does this movement, this explosion in wired social ventures, change the web?”

I asked that question specifically because of a contest organized by Social Actions, itself a social venture/startup and the clearinghouse for tens of thousands of opportunities to give, organize, volunteer and get involved in wired causes. Social Actions’s Change the Web contest challenges developers and entrepreneurs to use its database of more than 70,000 actions across more than 40 ‘CauseWired’ platforms in interesting and innovative ways – to build widgets, to distribute the data to key audiences, to parse searches in ways that encourage open source giving.

But an important part of the Change the Web effort is the dialogue around just how the web is changing, and how socially-wired it will be in the future. So this conversation aims to advance that conversation.

Next week’s panel should be great: Premal Shah of Kiva, Mari Kuraishi of GlobalGiving, and Mads Kjaer of MyC4. And we’ve done much our panel planning in public – on the Social Edge forum, and centered around the theme of changing the web. Meantime, a few quotes from the forum (but head over and put up your own thoughts):

Peter Deitz: “Let’s take this opportunity to pose the tough questions to Kiva, Global Giving, and MYC4. Are they collaborating with other platforms, and could the be collaborating more? Are they sharing as much donor / project / web analytics data as possible with an eye toward accountability and helping the Movement grow? What is their strategy when it comes to open APIs, and permitting transactions to happen anywhere and everywhere?”

Tori Tuncan: “What I have noticed is that the community is key. It is not enough to have a unique way for people to give and help others online. These donors (lenders) want to connect….It appears, then, that even though the internet gives us the ability to contribute collectively to causes with people we would have never known otherwise, human nature still dictates a certain need to connect on a deeper level than just clicking the same “donate” (or “lend”) button.”

Daniel Bassill: “I think that we’re on the verge of making huge shifts in how social benefit organizations are funded, thus, how well they do their work. So far what I’ve seen is a variety of hubs that list lots of causes and try to draw traffic through those portals to those causes. www.networkforgood.org was one of the first, and is one of the biggest, to my knowledge. I’m one of more than 700,000 non profits listed, and the number of people who have found me and donated because I’m on this site is probably less than a dozen, if that many. Thus, the first question is “how do these portals draw meaningful dollars and volunteers or other needed resources to a larger number of their members, or to all of them?” So far, it seems that the rich, brand name, or high profile, orgs just get richer because of how these portals draw more attention to them.”

Jo Davidson: “I see the golden age as a broad term for changes taking place in humanity, brought on by the information age. Just like the software developed necessary to collaboratively link social media, mobile technology, and peer-to peer networks, the golden age is a transformative shift in access to information….To the question, how can the web transformation (socially wired for the future) advance social entrepreneurship – the answer no doubt lies with connecting communities. And since people love to watch their digital footprint and be part of networks that connect them, a golden age for causes is only a matter of time.”

Joe Solomon: “What do web portals look like that let anyone fund and support social entrepeneurs in our own backyard. For example, What if, for $25, you could help fund the next electric car? ( http://tinyurl.com/greenloans ) How will Kiva.org and MyC4 contribute and collaborate in this conversation rather than compete. Is there a place to bridge online collabortion sites like Amazee?”

Mari Kuraishi: “[The] question “how does it feel and what are the opportunities associated with being part of a movement that’s rewiring the web for social change, and how can that transformation advance social entrepreneurship in general?” I’m not sure I have a ready answer for, but maybe it’s a great question to ask during the panel at the Forum. On the one hand there are days when my nose is so flat up against the grindstone my response would be, “what movement?” and other days I can actually feel the ground shifting. But I guess that’s part of the bipolarity of being an entrepreneur …”

Jeff Mowatt: “While we’ve been hung up on widgets we’re just beginning to realise that getting information technology to those who can’t afford it is the enabler. To the extent that Obama includes rural broadband deployment in the stimulus plan and Bill Gates awakens to the fact the poor people DO need computers.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvoXzhDZ724&e]

The rules were pretty simple. More than 2,500 organizations were represented by causes created during the Challenge. The Causes Giving Challenge awarded $50,000 to the cause with the most unique donors, $25,000 to the second and third place causes, and $10,000 to the next ten causes. Throughout the Challenge, Causes on Facebook awarded daily winners $1,000 for having the most unique donations in a single day. Any Facebook user could participate by using the Causes application to promote their cause through direct user-to-user messages, and feature it on their profile. In the end, a total of 32,886 donations accounted for $571,686 in donations supporting 747 different organizations – an average gift of $17.38. The Parade portion, which brought in contributions via the magazine’s website, accounted for another $1.2 million from 48,711 donors – for an average donation of about $24, slightly higher. These online fundraisers used widgets – bits of code users could pass around and put on their blogs to urge donations and involvemenet – and relied on charity donation sites Network for Good and GlobalGiving to process gifts. [An important disclosure is necessary: the Case Foundation is a client of Changing Our World, Inc., the consulting firm where I work, and the company has been involved in some of the online causes work of the foundation, although none of the information in this book comes from that relationship.]

As Jean Case, the foundation’s chief executive, observed: ““Thousands of people embraced new technologies, built new online communities, and proved that simple daily actions and small donations can inspire others and tap into their energy and passion to make a difference.” I’d argue that the manner in which the causes were supported on Facebook and through blog-based widgets and other tools on the Parade side of the ledger may count for more in the end than the money that was raised – because getting those contributions involved creating and activating a social network, a group of people who in the process probably learned a bit more about the causes they were supporting – and a group that may well be more open to real activism in the future than names on an email list. Further, I’d suggest that the online social activism portion of the program best-served one of the key goals of the Case commitment – priming the pump of activism with leadership.

And raising that money online took real leadership indeed.

Let’s take one of the top eight finishers in the Parade.com challenge as an example. Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children, a grassroots project of the Sharing Foundation, garnered 1,650 donations totaling $41,673 – and won a $50,000 grant from the Case Foundation for finishing in the top four among international causes. I know a little more about the foundation’s work in Cambodia, and the Route Out of Poverty program, which teaches Khmer to 100 children of illiterate farmers, and English to over 500 students seeking to move beyond subsistence farming. I know that thousands of Cambodian children grow up illiterate, with very few educational options. I also know that the Sharing Foundation’s Khmer literacy school helps farm children learn their native alphabet and numbers well enough to attend elementary school. I know that its English Language Program offers village students from eight to 18 the opportunity to learn Cambodia’s language of commerce, allowing them to obtain jobs in tourism and word processing. But I don’t know this because of a website, or a Facebook profile, or a cool blog widget, or a well-publicized giving challenge.

I know all of this because of Beth Kanter.

GlobalGiving tracked 1,650 donations to Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children – and one of them was mine. And I made the list because of Beth, a Boston-based consultant who is one of the Web’s most ardent champions of online social activism. In addition to her blogging, coaching work and consulting, Beth is passionate about the southeast Asian nation of Cambodia. A few years ago, sheadopted two Khmer children, and is quite passionate about helping them to know about their homeland and celebrate their culture. Beth writes about Khmer culture and technology at Cambodia4kids blog and maintains a web site with the same name that provides information for U.S. teachers and parents. Her Typing To Learn Khmer blog is where she practices her very basic Khmer language skills using Khmer Unicode. She has covered the Cambodian Blogosphere as an author for Global Voices Online, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Law at Harvard University.

In addition to her many accomplishments, Beth is something of a noodge – which in the kinder version of the Yiddish translation means “someone who pushes you, sometimes to the point of annoyance.” When I asked Beth for some information related to this book, she very kindly held her hand out, digital palm up. A member of the board of the Sharing Foundation, she was passionately committed to ensuring that its Cambodian cause made the top four finishers in the Case Foundation contest – and an inquiring journalist who is an only an online acquaintance simply didn’t qualify for a free pass. Every time I asked a question, Beth would shoot back some version of: “the deadline’s coming, did you make your gift yet?”

Beth bugged a lot of people, posted to her blog, and urged others to post the widget – a small graphic showing Cambodian children with the current giving levels of the campaign. I finally made a small gift, and posted the widget to my own blog. Other people asked me about and I told them what I knew. And some them went on to make donations. Now we’re all savvy about the small foundation changing the lives of poor Cambodian children. Beth’s leadership brought in needed funds, but it also created real awareness and a network of potential supporters for the future.

And there was a small reward, in addition to Beth’s hearty thanks. In March, two months after the Case challenges ended, Dr. Nancy Hendrie, the president of the Sharing Foundation, sent Beth a video that she posted to her blog and sent around the donors. Only ten seconds long, it nonetheless connected a frenzied online giving contest with real-world recipients. It shows dozens of small children sitting on the porch of the Roteang Orphanage. Prompted by an adult voice off camera, the smiling children shout a few words as loud as their voices would allow them – Thankyou! American! Challenge! Yaaaay!