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Do-Gooders With Spreadsheets
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: February 7th, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/opinion/30kristof.html
The World Economic Forum here in Davos is the kind of place where if you let yourself get distracted while walking by a European prime minister on your left, you could end up tripping over a famous gazillionaire. But perhaps the most remarkable people to attend ... are the social entrepreneurs. Nic Frances runs a group that aims to cut carbon emissions in 70 percent of Australian households over 10 years. His group, Easy Being Green, gives out low-energy light bulbs and low-flow shower heads after the household signs over the rights to the carbon emissions the equipment will save. The group then sells those carbon credits to industry to finance its activities. In the U.S., Gillian Caldwell and her group, Witness, train people around the world to use video cameras to document human rights abuses. The resulting videos have drawn public attention to issues like child soldiers and the treatment of the mentally ill. Now Ms. Caldwell aims to create sort of YouTube for human rights video clips. Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, demonstrated with Grameen Bank the power of microfinancing. His bank has helped raise incomes, secure property rights for women, lower population growth and raise education standards across Bangladesh and now the success is rippling around the globe. Politics is failing to solve all the big issues, said Jim Wallis, who wrote Gods Politics and runs Sojourners. So when that happens, social movements rise up. A growing number of the best and brightest university graduates in the U.S. and abroad are moving into this area (many clutching the book How to Change the World, a bible in the field).
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