Archive for the 'Making A Difference' Category

This is “economic development” as it ought to be practiced world wide.  Their definition of helping people financially isn’t a hand out. Instead they seek to give people a method that produces meaningful income. They’ve helped about 10,000 families this year.
From Kickstart International:
Maurice & Josephine Simatei live in Eldoret, Western Kenya. They lost their [...]

I, and many other folks love Kiva.org as a way to help people through microlending. Nevertheless not all that passes for microlending is an influence for good.
Basically big banks in the Third World are getting into microlending as the Banana Republic’s alternative to the “Pay Day Loan”. Because it’s popular, they can act like they’re [...]

The East Longmeadow Small Business Association is working to help the Planning Board come up with some workable solutions for home business owners. The antiquated zoning laws, created in 1962, do not reflect the economic realities of the community and business world today.
Thankfully this sounds like one Planning Board that is forward thinking instead of [...]

A quaint property with a combination of historical and sentimental value was saved recently – by a telecommuter.
Locals had feared that the hand built stone home would be bulldozed for apartment development by the new owners.
Instead a telecommuter whose wife works there locally has bought the home as a personal residence. An employee of a [...]

Becky McCray asked for help so I decided to pass this along. This blogger has the added challenge of cerebral palsy and wants to use the winnings to make her blogging go a bit easier.
Hi everyone,
I would like to thank you all for being such enthusiastic supporters over the past year, particularly with the [...]

Hopefully her 8 year old child will receive a kidney. In the meantime one thing that would make life easier is the ability for her to work at home.
I had a similar inquiry from a stay at home mom… I suggested she contact a virtual assistant temp firm.
Hopefully an employer will read the story locally [...]

I was sitting at the table yesterday after dinner with our extended family.
It was time to go through an annual ritual… put what you want for Christmas on a piece of paper and someone else will draw your name and get you what you wrote up to a limit of $30.
But I couldn’t think of [...]

You know about Kiva.org from my blog posts here… it lets folks with a PayPal account lend money to entrepreneurs world wide. My only problem now is that I’ve had a loan repaid and I can’t find any entrepreneurs from the microlenders I’ve chosen to work with. I thought that was because my chosen lenders [...]

The Angel Food Ministries Lens is still at #44… we’ll see what the next week holds.
I added a “links plexo” so that local Angel Food Ministries sites could add a link to their site without me having to do anything other than approve it after I make sure it’s an Angel Food Ministries site… not [...]

It’s Day 11 or 12 or something like that and the Angel Food Ministries lens climbed to #44 today.
Right now I’m still tweaking the lens. At first I was adding more content and now I’m trying to pretty it up a bit. Below you can see how I’m adding some colored text and highlighting to [...]