what's the good news?

Contribute magazine (September/October 07 issue)

Fasten your seatbelts. Think social networks, dozens or hundreds of them - yours, your best friend's, your co-worker's, your company's - all connected together digitally by six degrees, then organized around a single cause or idea, or a multitude of causes and ideas. Save the Whales, Pave My Street. Elect John Doe. End Global Warming. But don't stop there. Raise some money. Ask each one of these dozens, hundreds, thousands whom you've cause-wired to pitch in a dollar, and idea, a Saturday afternoon - from Delhi to Detroit. And then keep everyone posted by the hour or by the day on how much money they're raising, how their ideas are being harnessed (or not), or how their time translates into someone else's health or opportunity, or into everyone's clean air. Show them perpetually - with the simple click of a mouse. Sound far-fetched, like some warmed over 60's social change rhetoric? Guess again, this stuff is already happening, and maybe faster than you think.
- The Cause Web, Contribute Magzine

 

Web-powered social networks like Facebook and MySpace are growing up and getting heart...new applications like Causes on Facebook as well as the new nonprofit commons in second life are signaling a sea change in how people are working around the world to organize, collaborate, and raise money for social change.
- Marcia Stepanek, Editor-in-chief, Contribute magazine

 

...Almost half the world's population is under 25, Case says, and many are getting deeply and personally involved in causes in a way that hasn't happened before. And they're just getting started. Says Case: "I think we’ll look back at (today's) philanthropy as this quaint time when rich people wrote checks and we'll be living in a time (tomorrow) when philanthropy is part of everyday life."
- Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation

 

"For today's super-wired, always-on, live-life-in-public young Americans, the causes they support define who they are. Societal aspirations have so permeated the "net native" population that causes have become as varied and customized as downloadable music tracks and "blog bling."….Facebook, the social networking site that began on college campuses in February 2004…in the past six months, its Causes applications - code you can easily add to your online profile - has attracted more than two million members who together support tens of thousands of non-profit and political causes."
- Tom Watson