GivingMarket/OverView

Overview

The GivingMarket is envisioned as an online market (meeting place) where individuals with passion and projects that serve the common good and individuals with some financial and other resources could offer projects and funds, invite funding and action, lower the costs of searching out these exchanges, make individual action and giving easier, increase the volume of ideas and funds exchanged, increase the number of projects completed, increase the number of people able and willing to bring new projects and funds, in order to accelerate the care and feeding and expansion of the common good.

All of the necessary mechanisms and templates already exist in commonly known GivingMarket/WorkingModels whose names, if not functions, are well known to many. The potential is that a relatively simple combination of these things could support individual Projects and Giving on an unprecedented scale. More background in /KeyWordsDefined, /SmallChange, /BigChange and [InterraProjectMapping]. More on implementation in /HomePage and /NextSteps.

Project

The initial project is to open the GivingMarket as a place of action, movement -- an efficient, online, auction-style market in which little individuals connect with other "little (and not so little) individuals" -- in order to collectively and actively define and develop what is generally referred to as the common good. The central action is an expanding invitation to GivingMarket partners and participants to...

• Offer their personal gifts, skills and passions, packaged as project plans and resource requests
• Offer funds, resources, attention, referrals and other encouragement to the projects offered
• Connect active citizens with specific kinds of project ideas, connections, and implementation expertise
• Track and report giving, action, progress, results, new patterns and emerging issues
• Find activists and organizers willing to manage projects that giver(s) want to fund but not manage

Vision

Once a GivingMarket is up and running, a number of side markets might follow logically and easily...

• Fiscal agency boutiques that could help frame and present projects in return for 501c3 fiscal agency, credibility, deductibility of financial gifts
• Planned giving by "little individuals" with mechanisms like payroll deduction
• Endowment accounts with "program giving" (analagous to program trading) rules that would facilitate small individual foundation-like giving
• Cross-currency giving, allowing those in need anywhere in the world to request funds in any currently strong, stable currency, USD or otherwise
• Emergence of an efficient global network of giving that married the stability of the gold standard with the flexibility and responsiveness of fiat-backed money