No Snivelling

I've posted frequently about Unitus (if you're passionate about solving a great world problem, poverty, I highly recommend that you get involved with Unitus).

This summer, The Police are promoting Unitus during their summer tour; as part of that, the whole team came up on stage during sound check, and they then invited a Unitus employee, Jessica Ketola, to come and sign with Sting -- amazing!

Labels: gorge, microfinance, police, poverty, seattle, sting, the police, unitus

I was reading my gmail this morning, and a story teaser caught my eye -- it went something like "China says poverty problem more urgent than global warming". Gmail probably pitched that to me because of a TeachStreet blog post that I wrote yesterday about learning about microfinance; regardless, it piqued my interest.

The poverty vs. global warming article from the Associated Press essentially stated the difficult situation/tradeoff from China's perspective as:

• Developing countries should be able to emit more greenhouse gases, as they work to reduce poverty for their populace
• Developed countries, thus, bear more responsibility to cut emissions

While life isn't ever this binary/simple, I do agree with the basic premise. And, I'm sure that the United States in 1800 would have a vastly different opinion about the matter than we do now. In a perfect world, all countries would see this as a global responsibility, and strive toward goals that are in line with their current development stages. Fellow blogger UrbanOnramps highlights the fact that China accounts for more than half of global carbon emissions -- that is most definitely shocking, but again, I shudder to think about our own contributions during the Industrial Revolution. Best to find a common ground toward significant improvements over the next 30 years than reject negotiation altogether.

I'll leave with a small plug for a company/organization I'm a supporter of -- if you'd like to become a little bit more responsible with your greenhouse emissions and support a cleaner planet, I encourage you to learn a bit more about TerraPass -- they make it quick and easy to offset carbon emissions from your car, flights, home and more.

Labels: carbon emission, greenhouse gas, poverty, terrapass

I remained involved with a fantastic organization called Unitus - they work to alleviate poverty by using a venture capital model to increase access to microfinance.

As part of their efforts to increase awareness of microfinance and their innovative approach to alleviating poverty, on Monday they're launching a really creative campaign called "Empowering Women".

The idea is to encourage you to honor an 'Empowering Woman' in your life (maybe your Mother... good time, since Mother's Day is rapidly approaching :-) ) with a contribution that will help Empower Women who are lifting themselves out of poverty.

I encourage you to get involved -- it only takes a few minutes. Please consider a donation (any amount helps... even $5!). In addition, your emails, blog posts and video blogs are all incredibly beneficial.

Here are tributes to my mother and wife.

We're trying to spread the word -- one of our first posts was from Seth Godin -- that means a great deal to us, especially given the great work he does with Acumen Fund and other organizations -- thank you, Seth!

Some other great posts that have appeared from friends:
* Chris Pirillo, for Ponzi
* Jeff Barr, for his amazing wife Carmen
* Devin Thorpe, for the lovely Miss Thorpe
* Tim Stay, amazing person and Unitus Board member

Labels: acumen fund, empower, empowering woman, empowering women, microfinance, mothers day, poverty, woman, women