I’ve come across two amazing looking non-profits in these past few days, one thanks to Mike Cannon-Brookes and another thanks to Bruce Tate. The non-profits would be Kiva.org and ChangingThePresent respectively.

These are both phenomenal ideas. I haven’t used ChangingThePresent, but as soon as I saw Mike’s entry – I jumped in for the Kiva action right away. The business model is brilliantly executed, and the ability to put otherwise idle money to work helping people around the world is truly amazing.

Mike has probably summarized this better already, but the basic premise of Kiva is:

1. Deposit some money to Kiva via PayPal
2. Choose one of the businesses / people you’d like to lend to
3. Donate a minimum of $25 to that business
4. Once their are enough lenders to make up the requested loan amount, the person receives the loan and puts it to use
5. As the persons business increases (hopefully!) they are able to repay the loan over time
6. Once you have your money back, you can withdraw it, or lend it again to another business.

I believe that the success rate for loan repayments (if I remember from my reading) is somewhere around 96%.

What are you waiting for, jump in and help a guy selling vegetables out of the back of his car today!