Just several months ago, my friend in Hongkong sent around an email anouncing their charity oriented online startup - http://www.bbmcharity.com/ - a nonprofit website that links the donors directly with people in need. Today, upon stumbling on another friend's post on Facebook, I discovered its American counterpart, http://www.donorschoose.org/, a website that shares the same concept, but specifically focuses on public school education.
Having worked in finance for the last three years, and witnessed some of the lavish lifestyles of people working on the Street, it stuns me that some of the public schools don't even have the funding for basic teaching tools, in the order of $300 to $400, which could be a third of the cost of a designer handbag. By cutting out the bureaucracy and red tapes, these websites are truly making changes to people's lives, especially the young ones who represent our future.
On the other hand, I do worry about the scalability of those companies. How will they expand their impact if they are only relying on piecemeal and ad hoc donations from individual web surfers like us. The bigger funding issues of publich schools and other social projects can only be solved by the collective of the public, and it is up to the governments to make the systems work.
Nevertheless, kudos to the kind-hearted and creative people who are behind those websites. It is in them, we see the hope in our future ...
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