Opportunity Collaboration

With millennials poised to comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2014, I am unabashedly optimistic. In fact, I can't wait. Saul Garlick is one reason.

We are called upon to ask a simple question. Not "How can you help me?", but rather "How can I help you?" Not "How can you help me?", but rather "How can we work together?"

The Opportunity Collaboration draws its muscle from the conviction that people of good will forge their own solutions and uncover new ways to combine and leverage resources.

Once a year, I teach a course at the University of California Blum Center for Developing Economies, but all year long I am on the lookout for good boo...

In the 21st Century, Sakena Yacoobi's call for education is almost embarrassing. Don't we know this? Hasn't the American foreign aid establishment been paying attention? Why do we still need Sakena's pointed reminder?

If you have secured an independent income and are ready now to practice a bit of virtue, here are the 2011 Opportunity Collaboration Delegates working to "solve poverty" and create virtue with your capital.

If you think Portland-based Mercy Corps is an air ambulance service, a religious sect or a merciful military organization, you would be wrong.

We all know collaboration is a good idea. In politics, call it compromise. In business, call it a strategic alliance. Whatever you want to call it, teamwork produces results.

In an unexpected, but welcome, move, two prestigious and important actors in the social impact investing sector have announced to their respective memberships a full-on merger.

My recent purchases have helped an artist in a distant land feed his or her family and sustain, in a small way, an artistic and cultural heritage.

The discussion asked, "Can dedication to mission and the profit motive co-exist as seamlessly as some microfinance proponents suggest?" It is not as wonky as you might fear.

Whether infrastructure bonds or direct philanthropy, tapping into the profits from Diaspora-based donor kebab stands is a development idea with a lot of meat on it.

Why Maher is attending a fundraising dinner on May 25th in Los Angeles for Shine on Sierra Leone is a mystery. I will be there too. I'll have to ask him.

I am respectfully awestruck. Neither of these social change thought leaders have fallen victim to economic development hubris.

For over 25 years, Martin Burt has been a pioneer in applying microfinance, microfranchise, youth entrepreneurship and financial literacy to address chronic poverty in Paraguay.

A small community garden, situated in a remote rural backwater, is breaking new ground towards sustainable, organic, healthy food production.

Each week, friends, allies, colleagues and respected leaders and thinkers from around the world offer their thoughts, ideas, aspirations and plans for a better world. All provoke me in good and thoughtful ways.

Against this backdrop of unfair trade barriers and underhanded market competition, in Liberia a fair-trade clothing factory is competing internationally. It is globalization to believe in.

In the think-tank world of social change, collaboration is all the rage. The age-old notion that "two heads are better than one" has made a comeback.

Annually, Americans as private individuals working through private sector nonprofit organizations donate about $12 billion to causes and charities in the developing world.

The poor live in a complex world of competing and unmet basic needs. It is a world of few choices, and many hardships. Macro statistics abound, but what are the defining elements of poverty on the ground?

As apartheid died in 1994, Shared Interest was born. Operating today from humble offices on a noisy New York side street, the organization carries forward the pragmatic realism which ended apartheid politically.

Maurice Lim Miller is a frontline worker in the campaign to bring economic justice to America. You won't find Maurice at academic conferences or on book tours. He treats poverty not so much as a crusade, but as a puzzle to be solved.

The Calvert Foundation's mission is to maximize the flow of capital to disadvantaged communities in order to create a more equitable and sustainable society. It is the anti-Wall Street bank.