These days there is no shortage of mobile applications to support good causes. They range from fundraising apps for nonprofits, to community volunteering apps, to apps for locating environmentally friendly products.

Yet for some reason the social enterprise world has...

What would someone hope to get out of putting a small group of entrepreneurs tasked with rapidly building their companies onboard a ship with 600 college students sailing around the world? It may sound like the plot for a really bizarre reality TV show, but in fact it's not.

My kids looked at me funny when I announced we would be having "the best weekend ever." I could practically see visions of Disneyland in their nine and 11-year-old minds.

"But we won't be traveling," I said. "We're gonna do activities nearby (in the San Francisco Bay Area). Saturday...

"This has been a profound growing experience. One that has really changed the culture of our non-profit for the better in many areas."

These are the words of a nonprofit executive taken earlier this year from an anonymous survey by ZeroDivide of its grantees. The San Francisco-based Foundation...

Individual giving to charity is certainly easier these days. Support for the famine victims in Somalia is only a few clicks or a text message away. But more convenient giving does not necessarily translate to better or more sustained giving.

That's where giving circles come in....

In honor of teacher appreciation week, a long overdue letter:

Dear Mrs. Hamilton,

I write to you nearly 30 three years after sitting in your eighth grade English class at Emerson School. You likely have long since retired, and may not even remember me, but I remember you. In fact,...

The staggering growth in smartphone adoption has resulted in the creation of hundreds of thousands of mobile applications touching almost every interest area and type of user. But the target audience for cell phone apps and other mobile services is largely a mainstream one. Where are the apps to assist...

Long gone are the days of street protests and hunger strikes. These days the socially concerned 30 and under crowd are mostly on laptops joining Facebook Causes pages, Tweeting their moral outrage, and texting $5 donations to disaster relief efforts in between TV shows. Slactivism rules... or so...

A couple of months ago, I took a "kindness day" off from work. The idea was to spend a day committing at least 10 acts of kindness in and around my neighborhood - with the goal of generating one hundred more. I did simple things like leaving a...

Back in the early 1990s, I was a youth counselor working to help gang-active teenagers turn their lives around. One of the approaches I tried was to launch a T-shirt production company co-managed by the youth. The business never made a lot of money, but it did get a small...

It has been said that one man's trash is another man's treasure. That's exactly what the nonprofit organization Long Way Home is proving with a project to build a school made out of garbage. Located in the Guatemalan city of San Juan...

In a recent call to get to know a new business associate I was pleasantly surprised when he began describing his background in very personal terms. Instead of delving in to his lengthy work history he shared a moving story of how he had overcome sickness and emotional pain to...

Recently, I had the pleasure of facilitating an event called "Innovations in Social Justice: New Hope, New Actions" at the Hub in Berkeley, California. Among the panelists was a 21-year-old rapper, artist and community organizer who goes by the name Babye Champ, the Scraper Bike King....

Why is it that we put so much emphasis on valuing our financial and not our social assets -- things like helping a neighbor or volunteering for a charity?

The obvious answer is that money is easy to quantify while "social capital" is more nebulous. It's much easier to measure...

We live in a world where innovation equates with speed and efficiency. iPhones, Fast food and ever higher workplace productivity are what count.

No matter how distracted and even more rushed our lives become as a result of breakneck innovation we still crave the next big thing. We love...

When I was working with gang active and often violent youth in the early 1990s I remember asking a young gangbanger what gave him and his homeboys the idea to form a gang. He explained "we got it from the movie The Warriors."

The Warriors was a popular 1979 movie...

If you ask an alcoholic who is not yet sober if they have a drinking problem he or she might respond by saying: "don't worry -- I have it under control." When asked about overuse of all things digital, those of us who work and play tethered constantly to PCs...

A recent article in the New York Times about Singularity University got me thinking about how mainstream religions may be missing a major opportunity to become more progressive and relevant in the modern age.

The singularity, a notion popularized by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil,...

Much has been written recently about new cell phone applications targeting the religious community. Almost overnight there have appeared a series of iPhone and other downloadable smartphone apps which enable worshippers from every spiritual stripe to look up holy book verses, access meditation instructions, or receive prayer reminders on the...