The long road to another life.... via Charity Focus and ProPoor
By Frederick Noronha
Yoo-Mi Lee is South Korean, and when five, moved with her family to Uganda. For there, it has been a long road as she travelled in the US since 1971, moved from the east to west coasts in 1987, and is now based in San Francisco. In between, she had four different careers, and after being a research analyst and Wall Street trader ended up as a full-time volunteer.
"I tell the Charity FOcus people that they've ruined my life," she laughs. "Because I can no longer go back to a 'real', paying job."
To understand how that all happened is understanding the story of Charity Focus. What's this institution, and its ProPoor network all about?
Says Ms. Lee: "It was started as a development portal for South Asian NGOs, a place where they could find development news. It's a place where people could search for NGOs -- by country, by region, by sector and also by key-words. For instance, if I were looking for a job in a particular city in a particular sector, I could use the database to do that search."
But that's not all. ProPoor is also a place where people can find donor agencies, categories by type of agency. For instance, based on whether it is multi-lateral, government-based. Originlly, it had dated information like a calendar of events, job-openings. Says she: "Now we've taken this a little bit offline, and provide those kind of announcements in the form of a newsletter."
What they would eventually like for this site to be is a much more interactive site, where there could be many-to-many coversations. "NGOs can learn from each other, from consultants in the field, and from individuals. Individuals can learn not only what NGOs are doing, but the latest research in the field," she adds. There is a publications database that is also searchable.
But to understand ProPoor's present status and its goals, one perhaps needs to history. It was founded by a philanthropist, who was co-founder of Sony Entertainment TV, Jayesh Parekh, based in Singapore now. He's one of those serial entreprenurs who now runs a company called Mobiapps, offering applications for mobiles.
Narrates Lee: "He wanted to give something back to the community, and was having a conversation about it with a classmate, who happened to run a media services company in Kolkatta. So they set up the propoor.org. Initially they had 14 employees. The employees actually did all the work in terms of content gathering for the site. A couple of people read every newspaper they could find their hands on, searched the web, got on mailing lists for development news. From different nodal agencies, they worked to get events that might be useful for NGOs, trainings and conferences."
They actually sent out letters to NGOs, asking them to fill-in information, so that they could load it on the database. They would periodically send out emails, faxes and letters, asking NGOs for updated information.
All of this was handled by a full-time staff. But it was a difficult operation, and Jayesh wanted to hand it over to someone who could take it ahead.
Says Lee: "When Jayesh first met Charity Focus, did not believe a model of 100% volunteers was possible. So he kind of kept tabs on us for about a year, till he decided (laughs) well, it's working. He handed over the full portal to us (Charity Focus) to manage and operate..."
Charity Focus was itself founded by five friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, who previously had run a small donation club. Once a month they would put in some money each, maybe 50 dollars. They would then research small NGOs and donate that month's pool of money to them. But they didn't feel that what they were doing was enough.
"These were very young kinds. Founder Nipun Mehta was about 23 years old. Another was just 18. That was in 1999. When the dotcom boom was at its height. They decided that small NGOs, or even large NGOs at that time, couldn't afford entering the dotcom or Net world. Or even if it was affordable they couldn't find anyone to create suitable websites for them," says Lee.
At that time a basic website cost US$20,000. Now you can get it for $2000. The tools have beomcome more affordable.
So what Charity FOcus did was to take a close look at the 'Guide Star', a directory of non-profits in the US. They narrowed their hunt down to the Santa Clara county. They started 'cold calling', that is looking at the number and simply picking up the phone. They began offering to build something -- a website in cyberspace -- for free.
Initially, those at the receiving end of such offers were very skeptical. There was a lot of ignorance too. Says Lee: "At one place, somebody said yes. They went to physically meet the client. The director of that organisation took out a screw-driver and said, 'You're going to put something on my computer, right?'"
Initally this network did a lot of outreach to try and get non-profit clients. Very shortly after that, the requests for websites and the number of volunteers really grew exponentially. "We had some unsolicited media coverage. They couldn't believe here were kids, at the height of the dotcom boom, giving away free website services," says Lee.
So, pretty soon, they had to keep changing and scaling our procedures and website. It's going to undertake another huge change very shortly. Charityfocus.org has since taken over a dotcom pledgepage.com -- now called pledgepage.org
The latter's founders wanted to do it as a business. After three years they decided there's no business in seeking pledges of support for the non-profit world. They still had users whom they didn't want to lose, so they found Charity Focus and decided to hand over the operations of the portal to them.
Charity Focus has also since built an ecommerce platform called communityShops or simply cshops.org. The idea behind that is not just an Internet shopping portal, but a way to give community service organisations one more channel to distribute their goods, and also a way to communicate with buyers. To make people aware that there's a story behind the products and the work of the NGO.
"So when you're buying a hand-made greeting card, you know who made it and the circumstances of the person, and what the NGO is doing to help whoever it is. It could be a woman in the slum community or a former child labour," says Lee.
There are some other innovative ideas too.
"One of the oldest service of Charity Focus is a daily quote service, which Nipun started before he even started Charity FOcus. He started this application to braodcast it at 3 am in the morning, which he thought was so cool so that you can get in your mailbox every morning (laughs). We have quite a large subscriber base and now syndicating it for free so that anyone could get it," says Lee.
This generally contains a quote, a news item some -- called signs of light, of the good-news news -- and suggestions for any action you can do under the heading 'be the change'. You can subscribe to this inspiring service online at Charity Focus. There's a quote-a-day and the thought-of-the-week, which comprises a longer passage.
"Recently, we also hooked up with a person who had founded something called Enlightening Messges. Its goal is to have organisations or companies put quotes in the forms of banners on their sites. Instead of having an advertisement, you have a nice quote. We've taken that project, to help and distribute the banners," says Lee.
Charity Focus has something like 7000 volunteers now, worldwide.
Besides a background was a Wall Street trader, she has also been a business analyst and worked in business development. She was also herself briefly involved in a startup of a healthcare technology company.
"Now I'm a fulltime volunteer. I tell the Charity Focus people they've ruined my life. Because I can no longer go back to a 'real', paying job," she adds, half-seriously, and it's obvious that she gains a lot of meaning from her work. "We're involved with a lot of other Charity Focus volunteers who are continuing to think about ways how they can increase their (volunteer) service life, while continuing to do something in order to sustain themselves."
Says she: "Eventually we'd like to turn Charity Focus into Service Space, where anyone can incubate any type of service project that they have. So they can use the Charity Focus infrastructure and processes to serve their project. They can put out request for volunteers, or use our project management system." She adds that all of Charity Focus applications and programmes are open source -- they welcome anyone to take and replicate them.
Yoo-Mi Lee can be contacted via email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The websites are at http://www.charityfocus.org, http://www.propoor.org, http://www.cshops.org, http://www.pledgepage.org and http://enlighteningmessages.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436 http://fn.swiki.net http://fn-floss.notlong.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://goabooks.swiki.net * Reviews of books on Goa... and more
