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

Spoonful Apparel, founded by Susan Elwer, to end child hunger, sells comfortable clothing with inspiring messages and donates 50 percent of the proceeds to the effort. With slogans like “I choose kindness” emblazoned on the front, the clothing is virtually a living advertisement for doing good. The social enterprise sells the merchandise through online retail, to corporations and for events. To da...

Generous by nature and raised in a vulnerable circumstance, Elisa Torres, now a marketing manager at J&J’s Ethicon, is passionate about ending human trafficking. Recently, she raised money for A21 Campaign, a nonprofit that rescues women from slavery, using CaringCrowd, J&J’s global health crowdfunding platform. By making human trafficking more difficult, profit margins are squeezed and perpetrato...

One of the most remarkable social enterprises I’ve encountered in recent years is Ejido Verde, in Michoacan, Mexico, now run by CEO Shaul Paul. By reestablishing pine forest where they were once universal, Ejido Verde will grow a pine resin industry with the potential to employ thousands of people, lifting them into the middle class. Ejido Verde is helping indigenous people to cultivate and care f...

“Hunger is a year-round struggle,” Jane Leal, Vice-Chair for Feeding Middlesex County, says. She’s grateful for the fundraising help offered by Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd crowdfunding site that helped raise much-needed flexible funding to help close gaps in the community’s effort to feed those who are food-insecure. Jane helped raise almost $7,000 using CaringCrowd, nearly half of which was d...

Brian Meece, co-creator of WingaDoos, likes to say that WingaDoos is “Sesame Street for healthy money habit." Research shows that our relationship to money is established long before we have to start making financial decisions for ourselves. By the time we’re about eight years old, our concept of money is pretty fixed. This means that teaching high schoolers good money habits can be difficult. Win...

As a girl, while living in Jamaica, Davinia James once faced an extraordinary experience on her way home from school with her brother. Held at gunpoint, her brother faced the young gunman and yelled for his sister to run. Frozen by fear, she didn’t move even as the gunman held his gun to her brother’s chest. “Run,” he screamed. And she did. Frantic, she screamed as she entered her home, “He’s dead...

Damon West started using drugs by age 12 and before his 30th birthday was sentenced to 65 years in prison. After serving seven years, he emerged from prison completely changed. The key lesson he learned in prison was that you can change your environment. Now, as a motivational speaker, he teaches others how to do the same. Interview with Damon West, the of Damon West, LLC. The following is the pre...

Increasingly, we recognize that mental health is like physical health. It must be regularly assessed and treated. Still, we in the west often asssume that it is a problem only in the most developed countries. In fact, not surprisingly, mental health issues plague every country from rich to poor without regard to income. Sachin Chaudhry, an Ashoka Fellow, has developed an app using AI to help regul...

In the past 48 hours, there have been two major earthquakes in Southern California with an epicenter near the town of Ridgecrest. The quakes hit on July 4 and 5th, with the largest and most recent reaching a 7.1 on the Richter scale. In part due to the remote location, no deaths have been attributed to the quakes, but property damage across the region will ultimately be substantial. Kate Stillwell...

“Biomimicry is the practice of solving problems by learn asking the question, ‘What would nature do?” says Boston Impact Initiative Fund founder and President Deborah Frieze. Her answer to that question has her flipping conventional investing wisdom on its head to close the racial wealth divide in Boston. While she hopes the fund will serve as a model for other communities, she notes that the weal...

Donnetta Johnson lost her son Jonah to depression in 2009. Her experience was as life-changing as it was heartbreaking. She founded the My Son, Your Daughter, The Jonah Johnson Youth Scholarship Fund to raise money to help parents prevent the needless deaths that depression causes. Johnson says she thought she knew about depression and thought she and her family could “work through” the issues wit...

Pia Wilson-Body, president of Intel Foundation says the Intel Foundation is working to make STEM education more accessible to disadvantaged students, especially young women. “A zip code doesn’t determine brilliance but it does determine access,” she says. The Intel Foundation, under her leadership, is working to break down barriers and create a bridge to equity. She hopes to create not just consum...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2RFxWCH . Due to improved treatments, the number of annual HIV infections in the U.S. declined steadily for years until about 2013, but the latest statistics at HIV.gov show no improvement since. About 39,000 people annually are infected. One of the lead...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2YlyK29 . When I asked Josh Silver, co-founder and director of RepresentUs, to tell us what is wrong with politics in America, he responded with a question of his own. “Devin, what’s not wrong with the government?” He cites a Princeton paper that conclud...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . CaringCrowd, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson is a, sponsor of the Your Mark on the World Center. Robyn Shumer discovered the power of storytelling in her own life when she began to share her experience dealing with an eating disorder. She began with a TEDx talk but couldn’t stop telling her story. She organized What’s Your Sto...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2KrWJcj . What Sweden is doing about the refugee crisis is impressive. This country of about 10 million has received more refugees in recent years than any other rich country. Still, refugees face a difficult time running the bureaucratic immigration pol...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Tori Lyon, the CEO of the Jericho Project, which operates supportive housing units for 2,500 for formerly homeless individuals in New York City, joined me for a discussion about her work. She asserts simply that “Supportive housing is the solution to homelessness.” She explains how operating supportive housing is less expensi...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . When Charlotte Hughes Huntley, an epidemiologist, began to write and produce a podcast about her experiences finding her way in a challenging career field, she quickly developed a following. Today, she is as respected as a career guide as she as an epidemiologist. Click the following link to learn my insider secrets to media...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Charlotte Hommel was touched by the death of a friend’s child and decided to do something about the suicide epidemic in America. She used her employer’s crowdfunding site, CaringCrowd (which is open to the public) to raise money. Over two campaigns, she was successful in raising over $15,000. A longtime employee of J&J, Charl...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Eleonore Pauwels, a research fellow on emerging cybertechnologies at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, recently published a report highlighting the threats and opportunities for global policy makers. The threats should scare you. It isn’t that the machines will take over; rather, it is that people can...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2F3EBS6 , Increasingly, people want to be seen as making impact investments. Some in the socially responsible investing sphere, for instance, have started to describe their practice as a subset of a broader theme of impact investing. If there isn’t an ag...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . When I asked Bill Gates, 63, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, why polio, he began, “Polio is a terrible disease.” An hour later, speaking to a group of Rotarians in Spokane, Washington, he said, “You know, we're going to get to the end of this and Rotary will be the reason that will happen.” Before continuin...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Reginald Swift, CEO and founder of Rubix LS, is working to accelerate cures for rare diseases by utilizing new technology and increasing transparency between patients and companies. Interview with Reginald Swift, the CEO of Rubix LS. The following is the pre-interview with Reginald Swift. Be sure to watch the recorded intervi...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Recently, Chris Federer led an expedition of CHOICE Humanitarian volunteers from Utah on an expedition to Bolivia. While there, the volunteers worked to add a new room and roof to a school. Following the volunteer expedition, Chris led the Bolivian staff of CHOICE through an exercise to help them develop new fundraising capac...

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin . Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2EseHag . “In 30 years, nine billion people around the world will need clean water and food on a planet that will only be able to adequately supply an amount sufficient for a third of us,” Dr. Ku McMahan, 37, says. Lacking a silver bullet solution, he le...