Tag Archives: Kiva

Overcoming ‘compassion collapse’ with crowdsourced CSR

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Getting individuals involved in helping to tackle the world’s immense problems — poverty, hunger, unemployment, environmental issues — is a tough task. People don’t feel they can make a difference.

“The problems we know are so big that compassion collapse gets in the way of taking action,” Premal Shah, president of Kiva, a nonprofit microfinancing site, said in a keynote at Business4Better.

Premal Shah

Kiva tries to overcome this problem with a website that makes social issues personal and “human scales” the world’s problems, Shah said. The site provides information on entrepreneurs, such as a 25-year-old woman in Kenya needing a loan to help with her business, and enables individuals to make loans. Continue reading →

What It Takes to Lead a Business with Social Purpose

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E-Rewards and Give Something Back Office Supplies (GSB)are shining examples of competitive businesses that are doing business with purpose to change lives. At the 2013 Business4Better Conference, Kurt Knapton, CEO of E-Rewards, and Mike Hannigan, President of Give Something Back Office Supplies, shared their personal journey to create successful businesses that have a larger social purpose.

Mike Hannigan (GSB), Kurt Knapton (e-Rewards), Sophie Faris (B Lab)

“I am capitalist first”, spouts Knapton.  “While do social good is important, you need to have the business experience to compete at a very high level”.  Knapton leads E-Rewards, a fast-growing B2B research company that organizes survey panels made of up 6.5 million consumers in more than 40 countries. Knapton was inspired by doing something bigger and better.  He refers to Peter Drucker, father of modern management, who states that the business bottom line is measured both by business value and changing lives.  E-Rewards is a for profit company who now is offering its consumers options in the form of both extrinsic rewards/gifts and intrinsic rewards.  The intrinsic rewards are fulfilled through Kiva where survey takers can transfer their reward to microfinance loans.  The result is $250,000 in loans impacting 11,000 people in just a few short months. Continue reading →

Premal Shah of Kiva Will Keynote at Business4Better

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“With a mobile phone, you can be sitting inside a hut in rural Kenya and within seconds get money from San Francisco, California,” said Premal Shah, President of Kiva.org in a brief interview for Intel’s Sixty Second Insights.

Premal Shah, President of Kiva.org

What is Kiva? In short, it’s a non-profit organization that facilitates micro-lending to people around the globe and helps them grow their small businesses. Continue reading →