Superpowers for Good: Empowering Changemakers for Social Impact via Regulated Investment Crowdfunding from the SuperCrowd.

Beginning with English language training, Utah-based FluentWorlds is delivering its immersive 3D experience to your phone. Available for both Android phones and iPhones, the technology is winning fans. CEO, David Bradford, 68, leads the company with his wife, Dr. Linda Bradford, who has a PhD in instructional psychology and technology. She serves as the chief product officer. Their son, also David...

In 2012, Congress passed and President Obama signed the JOBS Act, a law that authorized investment crowdfunding. A wide variety of for-profit businesses, many of them having a social mission, have taken advantage of the law to raise money from small investors under either Title III, implemented as Regulation Crowdfunding or Title VI, implemented as Regulation A+. TechSoup is an international nonpr...

CaringCrowd.org , by Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health, is a sponsor of the Your Mark on the World Center and GoodCrowd.info . Rehema Home is an orphanage in Kenya that cares for children, about half of whom are HIV positive. These wonderful children are often in need of medical care. Rehema Home raised over $10,000 on CaringCrowd, Johnson & Johnson’s global health crowdfunding platform. J&J...

Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, literally coined the term “social entrepreneur” when he founded the nonprofit back in 1980, almost 40 years ago. He also decided that changemaker was one word and not two, something the Oxford dictionary now recognizes (though Webster’s does not, to the Drayton’s consternation). Drayton says, “We all sense that society is at a profound, indeed historic turn...

Personally impacted by wildfires in her Northern California community, Julia Jackson saw the impact of climate change and recognized that the time for talk was long past and went to work. Julia created the nonprofit Grounded to accelerate the work of climate change reversing technologies. An admirer of Paul Hawken and his work at Project Drawdown, she has sought to accelerate some of the very tech...

LifeNet International is working to save lives in sub-Saharan Africa by building capacity within the existing health care infrastructure. By equipping the facilities and training the people there, the organization hopes to transform them, allowing them to save more lives. Maggie Ehrenfried, managing director of development for LifeNet, joined me to talk about the organization’s impactful work and...

"I am on a mission to provide clean and affordable energy to women and girls in African rural communities through the use of modern technologies like AI,” says Monique Ntumngia, 29, founder of the Green Girls Organisation working in Sub-Saharan Africa. The organization uses a unique scoring algorithm called MNKB92 to optimize energy strategies for villages where they train women and girls to assem...

Having created a technology for nonprofits that has the potential to accelerate their fundraising and their impact using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Art Komarov has learned a few things about the adoption of new technology. He shares some powerful insights to help nonprofit leaders implement the latest and greatest tech for good. Interview with Artiom (Art) Komarov, the Co-Founde...

Wendy Burton has been planting Empress Splendor trees for about two decades. With help from crowdfunded investors from Wefunder, along with accredited investors participating in a Regulation D 506(c) offering, her company, World Tree, will plant thousands of these carbon sucking trees across the western hemisphere. She says the tree is the fastest-growing hardwood tree on the planet. While it grow...

Having created the fastest growing fintech company in Pakistan by on-boarding more than 70,000 people, Naureen Hyat, 33, co-founder and head of Tez Financial Services has a long way to go to reach her goal of financially empowering the 100 million people in her country who are unbanked or under-banked. Visa recently held a Shark Tank-style competition for women entrepreneurs in around the world in...

The processes corporations use to find candidates to fill open positions is fraught with weaknesses that perpetuate bias. Arthur Woods of Mathison.io is hoping to change that for good. Woods, despite being a white, not-yet middle-aged man, counts himself among diverse individuals. Like Alan Mathison Turing, the inventor of the first electronic computer for whom the company is named, Woods is gay....

Dr. Eric Liguori, executive director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Rowan University is passionate about doing good in the world. Under Liguori’s leadership, Rowan University will be hosting crowdfunding training for nonprofits, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd with me as the trainer on September 24, 2019. Register here. Liguori is a remarkable educator. Named edu...

Playing on the adage that it is better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish, Joseph Carbone, 66, founder and CEO of the Utah-based non-profit Eye Care 4 Kids, says you have to ensure they can see the fishing pole. “That is what we do at EC4K,” he says. In under 20 years, the organization has helped about 300,000 people obtain free or affordable eyeglasses. While most of those kids liv...

Mike Jacobs of IBM’s corporate social responsibility team, joined me to talk about the ways IBM is using its technology for good, especially water scarcity. All the technology that is being used by corporations for business purposes is now being deployed, often on concessionary terms, to address social problems. Interview with Mike Jacobs, the Business Strategy Leader & Chief of Staff, Corporate S...

Kevin White spent 20 years in the Marines. In 2004, he was stationed at the European Command (EUCOM) as the humanitarian assistance program manager. He witnessed efforts to provide eyeglasses to people who needed them. The process was cumbersome and inefficient. For the past 15 years, White has been working to develop a better process for helping people who can’t afford glasses to get them. He has...

Greg Brodsky, 42, founder of Start.coop , a startup accelerator for co-ops, says the interesting thing about co-ops is that people love them but don’t know what they are. He’s working to keep the former and change the latter by helping social entrepreneurs launch successful ones. “Co-op is this funny word that most people have heard, but really very few people can accurately define,” Brodsky says....

On our current path, 40 percent of demand for water is likely to be unmet in 2030. We’re talking about water shortages of biblical scale! Mindy Lubber, the CEO and President of Ceres, is working to prevent that. Focusing on actors with the most to lose—corporations that have the most exposure to water—she moves investors to advocate for greater accountability. The results are dramatic. Companies a...

Social entrepreneur Leesa McGregor, was thinking not only about how to teach her three-year-old Max the alphabet but also how to teach him values. She hit on the idea to create an alphabet book that used values rather nouns like apple, book and cat. The book, A New Alphabet for Humanity, beautifully illustrated, is ready for publication. To raise the funds necessary for publication, Leesa is runni...

Mohammed Faisal has not been thwarted by the random accident that nearly killed him in January. He passionately continues his work, using his struggle to regain his life as an inspiration for others. Mohammed is the founder of The Money Hub, which works with kids in New York City high schools to help them learn basic and important financial literacy skills. He saw his home life transformed by his...

Dr. Jonathan Foley, 50, executive director for Project Drawdown, joined me for a discussion about climate change (watch in the video player above). His statement, “This may be the single biggest business opportunity in human history,” sounds like hyperbole but there may be no one better qualified to make that statement correctly. With a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Wisconsin...

Candice Whitely joined Sewing New Futures four years ago when she visited New Delhi and saw the work the nonprofit was doing there to help women make a transition from prostitute to seamstress. In the community of Najafgarh in the suburbs of Delhi, the residue of India’s infamous caste system condemns women to marry young and into sex work to feed their families and pay their own bride price. Sewi...

Michael Dash is taking a step back from the hard-charging life he led for so long to re-center. In the process, he’s dealt with his own addictions and gained some powerful perspectives. He shares his insights in he book Chasing the High. He also shares some powerful insights in our conversation, which you can watch above. Interview with Michael Dash, the CEO of FATE - From Addict To Entrepreneur ....

“Tegu takes us back to the joy of play,” says Jose Zelaya, the Honduran toy manufacturer’s accounting manager. More importantly, the creator of wooden blocks with embedded magnets that fascinate and engage children, is employing people in a country stressed by poverty, unemployment and violence. Tegu, founded by Chris and Will Haughey a decade ago, with the mission to create jobs in a country that...

In 1998, Kurt Ver Beek had been living in Honduras for nearly a decade when he and four Hondurans founded the Association for a More Just Society, initially with the primary goal of delivering aid to vulnerable families. Quickly, however, they realized that little progress could be made without addressing the violence and corruption that then plagued and continue to plague the Central American cou...

For nearly two decades, Christie’s Place has been a refuge and a resource for women living with HIV/AIDS in San Diego. While the organization receives funding from a variety of sources, some of the funding comes with constraints and limitations. Recently, Christie’s Place raised money via CaringCrowd, Johnson & Johnson’s global public health crowdfunding site, because it allowed the nonprofit to f...