Givvy is a comprehensive online giving management system launching in early June. This is a real project with a dedicated team working without funding at this point.

Charitiable giving is personally and emotionally rewarding. By providing a framework and set of tools to improve the way we support our causes, Givvy users will feel more satisfied and successful with their giving.

Givvy is a system to enable donors to accomplish the following:

1. easily create and manage their giving plan
2. research over 1 million charities/nonprofits
3. execute their giving (donate thorugh Network for Good) and track donations made via other methods (mail, phone, etc.)
4. analyze their giving footprint - what types of charities, what geographic reach, how close their actual giving is to their plan, etc.

At Givvy we believe that better tools for giving can result in a better world.

This is a simple mashup using Network for Good’s donation API, with a particular focus on enhancing the donor experience with a virtualization of recent donations.

The NFG API mashed-up with a Google map would show all donations made to specific causes (by location) for a given time period over a US or World map.

This could be used on the homepage of Network for Good - to inspire others based on the action currently taking place.

Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas

Portland, Oregon has a homeless “problem,” one it is working devotedly to addressing with its 10 year plan (begun in 2005) to end homelessness by 2015.

At the same time, many pundits and politicians feel that resources are going unaccessed or improperly accessed. An often bandied about figure is that the majority of resources devote to homeless support go unused, either because they are unneeded or the incorrect type of support. A Space to Start believes that resources and their access are spatially bound and by understanding this relationship, resources can be better applied in the community. This project seeks to create a better understanding of where specific types of resources are needed based on where the homeless typically engage in daily activities. By utilizing our rich background in ethnographic research, we wish to create a “map” of homeless individuals – where they exist and how they travel, where they go and where they don’t. This will be entered into a GIS map using GPS locations.

This is only half of our dataset, the other half will consist of the locations and utilized rates of the over 95 homeless support organizations in the Portland metro area. We will track maximum support capable of being given along with the amount that is actually given with a particular emphasis on where funding is allocated and where it is not.

By using our combined skillsets – ethnographic research and GIS creation – we will create a visually rendered map mash up that challenges the flawed concept of a surplus of resources. Instead illustrating the importance and specificity of space and its deterministic character in an urban environment.

This will create something useful both by homeless advocates and policy makers attempting to enact Portland’s 10 year plan successfully. It will give everyone a visual representation of their policies in action and enable the better allocations of resources. It will also provide an understanding of why some resources are used while others abandoned.

Alchemlist will make donating (stuff) as easy as item, zip, search while creating and expanding community around donation. People will discover non-profits that exist in their own communities, perhaps right next door, that they never knew existed, become aware of their needs, and be inspired to take action to help meet those needs.

Non-profits (especially small non-profits) will receive increased donation of in-kind items and greater visibility that leads not only to donations but to more volunteers and monetary donations as well. The site will help raise awareness about all the non-profits working in our communities and their needs as well as the issues that they formed to address so that we can help ease the needs of our neighbors.

Alchemlist will help save landfill space (and closet space!) as people find homes for items they would have thrown in the trash or gathered dust in their home.

A greater sense of community and altruism will be fostered.

The built infastructure of our cities will come to reflect the ambitions and priorities of all the city's inhabitants, not just those with political and financial clout.

Historically, in every major city in America, poor communities of color have been burdened with more than their fair share of toxic infrastructure (e.g. waste transfer stations, power plants, sewage treatment facilities, freeways etc. etc.). Habitatmap's online community mapping platform will highlight these disparities, and our social networking tools will empower people to mobilize for equitable and livable cities.

The African Soul, American Heart humanitarian project, supporting Sudanese Lost Boy and war orphan Joseph Akol Makeer, will build a orphanage / orphan center in Duk Payuel, southern Sudan, to provide food, shelter, school supplies, and other basic life needs for the 2,000+ orphans of that village. A really successful fundraising campaign will allow us to build other orphanages / orphan centers for the 16,000+ orphans in Duk County, southern Sudan. The project team has 30 hours of video footage; we are working towards a 30-50 minute documentary about Joseph's life and his goal of building an orphanage in his home village. The documentary will be complete by fall 2008; a fundraising goal of $100,000 has been set for fall 2009, the orphanage / orphan center will be operational by fall 2010, although some aid can be delivered as funds are raised.

There is enormous potential in using the Internet to marshal the resources of faith-based communities to more effectively provide social services to under-resourced communities. Faith-based organizations make up 22 of the top 100 nonprofits in the USA, and over 90% of these organizations’ budgets are focused on social services. Faith-based volunteers in the USA provide over $51.8 billion in volunteer time each year. Christian organizations globally have a combined budget of $390 billion, and Christians together have a combined income of $18.17 trillion. Our vision is to use the Internet to greatly increase the amount of these resources that is going toward social services serving under-resourced communities.

Over the next ten years, the goal of our TechMission Online program is to use the Internet to deliver over $700 million in resources from the faith-based community to provide social services to under-resourced communities. Over the next 10 years, this will include serving over 50 million web visitors, placing 1 million volunteers, providing 150,000 items of creative commons content for nonprofits, providing nonprofit college courses to over 6,500 students and funding 700 full-time interns. The end goal is that these increased resources would enable organizations to serve millions more individuals in under-resourced communities, with hundreds of thousands of individuals participating in youth programs, being placed in jobs and college, receiving educational certification and participating in rehabilitation programs.

TechMission Online is a mashup utilizing partnerships with the largest Christian social service organizations in the world that serve over 15 million individuals from low-income communities each year. Our partners include the Salvation Army, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, World Vision, Youth Partners Net, Christian Community Development Association, Urban Youth Workers Institute and thousands of local social service agencies. We enable these partners to rebrand our online volunteer matching service and Web 2.0 portal to serve their individual communities. This enables us to provide a common database of opportunities and set of tools across many different partners. We also provide both Christian and secular brands of our online services so that we can effectively target Christian social service organizations while also providing resources without faith-content to other communities.

Currently, in New Orleans, there is a run away process for the demolition of housing.

From Kelly Voight in the comments of Squandered Heritage.

My house at 5537 Franklin Avenue was demolished without proper notification to me or the mortgage company. Out of 4 notification channels, the city only followed 2 of their 4 channels.

We had been waiting for the city to issue us a renovation permit for almost 18 months. I had called and traveled to the 5th floor of City Hall. I had taken pictures and filled out all correct forms for my permit. As of the day that they knocked my house down, the permit was still “pending.”

My house was a 1945 Gentilly bungalow with double parlor, original floors, the Gentilly tile, and deco molding. It was in no danger of falling down. My contractor drove by, called, and asked why there were bulldozers on the property the morning they tore it down. Before he could reach us, the house was gone.

I cannot return to the city now. I feel such pure fury when I think of my house being torn down. City bulldozers trespassed on my property and tore down my lovely Gentilly bungalow. New Orleans has nothing to do with America anymore. New Orleans is dead to me, and I will not lift a finger to help or give back to it again.

Was this an accident? No. I is a pattern of negligence on the part of the city. An unimaginable abuse of power.

People have returned for the weekend to work on their homes, only to find them gone as noted in the Wall Street Journal story Katrina Survivors Face New Threat: City Demolition . People have been awoken to the sound of Entergy cutting the wires to the house in which they live as described in this NPR story New Orleans' Wrecking Ball Levels Healthy Homes.

The Recovery School District is now requesting permits to demolish dozens of schools, while HUD is in the midst of destorying thousands of units of public housing.

It is all happening quietly, while we struggle to rebuilding our homes. This project will tell people which structures are being demolished and where.

• Thousands will find local services like food, shelter, jobs
• Thousands of web users will be more aware on homelessness
• Access to immediate information for the displaced available
• 10 people will start new businesses
• 20 people will imagine and build their new virtual home
• These 20 people will become peer mentors for another 20.

After building their virtual homes, the 40 virtual world participants will be able to tell us whether they feel closer to being able to design a RL reality that includes a home.

Their findings will help determine whether virtual worlds like Second Life are an appropriate tool for people to use in redesigning their lives.