To stay true to my promise to highlight a great program each week. The great program of the week is Civic Ventures. I will now move on to some thoughts I have had.

Business entrepreneurs move society forward, continuously pushing the envelope of productivity through continuous innovation. Research shows that what drives entrepreneurs isn’t money as much as challenge and achievement.

In past posts, I have made it clear that I am for ethical individuals seeking a single bottom line. Taking into account the realities of the world, human nature and history I can’t in my wildest dreams or most sincere logic conclude that double-bottom line companies will on average ever achieve the same positive social impact as ethical single-bottom line companies. This does not mean I am against double-bottom line companies. What I am for is - every person’s talents, motivations and abilities being aligned with their actions and creations so as to produce maximum positive value to society. So for some, a double-bottom line approach may make more sense than a single-bottom line. But the large majority of people’s talents, motivations and abilities will be better aligned and maximized in a demanding, profit-maximization environment. Just to be clear - if a person has impeccable character - all arguments that would suggest that a double-bottom line model is superior then go away. I can back that up, but won’t go into it now. Here is the kicker and my main point: A person with impeccable character will have a greater positive impact with a profit maximization mentality than a double bottom line mentality. So if you’re a good person then a single-bottom line may be the best way to go? If your motive for having a double-bottom line is to show that it is actually more profitable to take a double-bottom line approach then you’re really focused on profits and therefore have a single-bottom line approach after all.

A  while back I read a comment in the comment section of an article “MBAs Gone Wild” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that did a decent job of supporting my point:

“Here’s a suggestions to those large companies and business schools who may be thinking of how to increase the pro bono work of their MBAs to help out nonprofits. Why not take all that wonderful expertise and take a look at the internal business practices of the for-profit sector? How can the MBAs on your staff help you figure out a way to pay your low-wage workers more? Or how to reduce your environmental impact? Or how to prevent, rather than cause a large-scale mortgage crisis? That would lighten the work load of the nonprofit sector tremendously!”

If philanthropists want to maximize their social impact, their impact has to be related to creating and supporting an ideal environment for ethical, single-bottom line entrepreneurs.

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From today onward, for as long as I post to PosiPeople I will dedicate each post to one of the most effective entrepreneurs I am able to find providing direct-services to the poor and needy.

At times I will highlight organizations based simply on a recommendation from an individual who’s opinion I highly respect, other times I will base my reasons for highlighting an entrepreneur on overwhelming evidence. Whether my post is highly subjective or objective - each program will embody natural, timeless principles like: liberty, opportunity, faith, character, hope, personal responsibility and charity.

Charity has largely and falsely come to mean: the mindless giving of money. I hope to help restore it to its original and truer meaning. If you can imagine what an all wise, loving mother feels for her child, you then have a good idea of what charity is. It isn’t something you give, it is something you posses.

In my old line of work as a manufacturing engineer it was almost unforgivable to make the same mistake twice. Nothing destroyed our image of competence faster than repeating a gross error. Continually giving money away without making a conscious effort to place that money where it will have the greatest positive impact is synonymous with making the same mistake over and over again. If an individual is not confident that their money is being given to the most effective organizations within the areas they care about, then they should stop giving until they are.

There is a significant amount of organization-level research that exists, but it is scattered across the world wide web, and I imagine even more so across personal computers and intranets. In order to identify the most effective entrepreneurs providing direct services to the poor and needy I will need to begin identifying and aggregating links to all the third-party organizations providing rigorous organization-level evaluations on organization effectiveness. Both those organizations who make their evaluations public and those that don’t.

Here’s the beginning of a list :
www.cachildwelfareclearinghouse.org
ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc
www.wsipp.wa.gov
www.calvinedwardscompany.com
www.genevaglobal.com
newprofit.org
www.ashoka.org

The more in-depth, professional evaluations we can amass, the more confident we can be that we have truly identified the most effective organizations serving the poor and needy. I hope you will add more links in your comments.

I will highlight the first high performing organization next week.

“The highest degree of charity—above which there is no higher—is he who strengthens the hand of his poor fellow Jew and gives him a gift or [an interest-free] loan or enters into a business partnership with the poor person.” - Maimonides, Ladder of Tzedakah

Maimonedes, who lived from 1135AD to 1204AD, is well known as the first person to write a systematic code of all Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah. One of his small contributions, cited among donors who have researched how they might best give their money away, is his hierarchy of giving known as the Ladder of Tzedakah. “Doing business with the poor” is just one of the many ways that the highest level of charity is translated and written. The common thread in all translations is to help the poor become self-sufficient.

There are 110,000 people in Zimbabwe who are dependent on the nonprofit CARE who are not getting the food they need each month since the crackdown of Mugabe on international aid flowing into to Zimbabwe. Although it is probably no longer fair to pick on CARE for irresponsible giving it demonstrates what food aid programs have done for many years: created dependency. If CARE had rejected federal aid a long time ago, as they are now, Zimbabwe may have 110,000 self-sufficient people who are better able to weather the current political storm.

I have made the point in past posts and will continue to make the point many more times - the single most charitable thing anybody can do is to start a ridiculously profitable, innovative and responsible company. The other point I will never grow tired of reiterating is individuals are corrupt not corporate structures.

So what is the positive news in this post? Where are the positive people?

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