#plugintodevin - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

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Mark Courtney, CEO and founder of 121Giving, which helps nonprofits raise money and in-kind donations. The platform gives nonprofits an opportunity to buy goods they need at a discount as well.

The company is presently raising investment funds using its own platform.

Preliminary Interview with Mark Courtney, the Founder and CEO

Of 121Giving.

Crowdfunding Page: https://goo.gl/41Tk5Z

Facebook: facebook.com/121Giving/

Website: 121giving.com

121Giving supports crowdfunding or fundraising for Donations, Pre-sales/Rewards, Equity or other investment instruments excluding coins or tokens, Coins or tokens, We are considering all factors right now which are private.

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Noah Gainsburg has been volunteering at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center for years, mentoring and tutoring youth there. In recent years, he’s become a star fundraiser as well.

Christi Green, the executive director at the Center, says Noah is an extraordinary young person who is making a big difference. She particularly admires the confident way he interacts with and tutors the younger kids who are so differently situated.

Noah explains that he believes his experiencing the challenges of dyslexia helps him to relate to others, regardless of their trials.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2Sa1mYW.

Water.org, the nonprofit resulting from the 2009 merger of Matt Damon’s H2O Africa and Gary White’s WaterPartners, has completed an $11 million impact investing pilot project and has already closed on $33 million in a new fund that they hope will reach $50 million.

The transition from an entirely philanthropic approach built around drilling wells and building toilets to an investment model is motivated by a desire to reach more people, White, 55, the CEO says. “Frustration with the pace of our impact led me to try something entirely new.”

The resulting model does not require Water.org—or WaterEquity, the new entity it formed to make and receive water, sanitation and hygiene or WASH-related impact investments—to make individual loans to consumers in their target markets. Instead, WaterEquity provides investment capital to microfinance companies that provide loans to low-income consumers at affordable rates for WASH upgrades in their homes.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2Sa1mYW.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2EpM26y.

Dr. Michelle Harrison, the founder of Shisur Sevay, says, “There was a moment where I said to myself, ‘So, you’ve always been a critic, see if you can do any better.’”

After visiting Kolkata, she repeatedly heard that there was a category of unadoptable girls for whom nothing could be done and short, miserable lives are all that they could hope to experience. Harrison couldn’t believe that “nothing” was the best that could be done and set out to prove it.

Her home, which she describes as “non-institutional,” suggesting a smaller scale and more homelike atmosphere, now houses about 15 girls, about half of whom have a significant disability.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2EpM26y.

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Nicholas Metropulos, 19, leads Fishing for Families in Need, a nonprofit organization founded by his brother more than a decade ago. The organization teaches children about the environment and responsible angling. As the name suggests, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit also provides fish to hungry families.

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Cynthia English founded Global Scribes to create an international peace movement for youth that empowers them to make a difference starting wherever they are. With members in 44 countries, the organization is off to a good start.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2UvrOxP.

Investing in regenerative agriculture has the potential to address not only the food supply but also climate change, peace and conflict resolution and the water supply to boot. This impact investing strategy could be the biggest lever for creating positive change available to investors today. It also appears to generate healthy financial returns.

Craig Wichner, 49, founder and managing partner for Farmland LP, a fund manager that invests in converting conventional farmland to regenerative, organic farming. “It has so many benefits to the environment, to human society,” he says. “But we're also demonstrating that you can grow a great, healthy, wonderful food and be more profitable than conventional agriculture systems.”

Farmland LP acquires traditionally managed farmland, typically used to produce commodity crops and converts it to organic using regenerative practices. Wichner reports generating gross margins of 40 to 50% on wine grapes. Margins hover around single digits for conventionally-grown commodity

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2UvrOxP.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2SGOidw.

Nonprofit Providence St. Joseph Health, the third largest health care system in the United States, traces its roots back to the Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of t. Joseph of Orange. Their missions were to serve all members of their communities, “especially the poor and vulnerable,” says Aaron Martin, 49, executive vice president and chief digital officer. That motivation now guides the system’s $150 million health care impact investment fund.

Martin, who had no health care experience before joining Providence, now leads its efforts to improve health outcomes and improve service levels using technology. Investments are made via Providence Ventures, a fund created by the parent and funded entirely by it to accelerate the digital mission.

So far, the fund has invested in 13 companies, two of which were Providence innovations that are being spun out in hopes that they will grow more quickly and benefit not only Providence but all health care providers.

Venrock, which raised $450 million in its latest fund, has co-invested with Providence Ventures on two companies: Kyruus and Lyraa Health. Venrock partner Bryan Roberts says, “Aaron is terrific; he has the knowledge of a technology and growth savvy operator with the scale of a health system at his disposal. This allows him to bring a new lens to the change-resistant, defensive technology approach of the healthcare industry while still being grounded in the current practices and having a large sandbox in which to pressure test these new ideas.”

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2SGOidw

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As the plant-based economy booms, Måns Ullerstam’s vision of a cleaner, more sustainable environment that is no longer threatened by climate change is beginning to gain credibility and legitimacy.

Måns is raising funds on FundedByMe to allow his Kale United to invest directly in and provide other support to startups focused on the vegan community. Investments may go to virtually any player in that ecosystem from the farmers to app developers if they enhance the movement.

For Måns, the important impact of a vegan lifestyle is environmental. He acknowledges that not killing animals to eat them tends to extend their lives and that a vegan diet is recognized by many scientists as being more healthy, but his focus is on the environmental benefits--especially climate change.

Agriculture produces more carbon than any other sector of the global economy. Reducing consumption of meat and dairy has more potential to mitigate climate change than any other change humans can make he says.

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Christian Harrison was still a child when his older sister Kasee went missing. It would be decades before it was determined that she was one of Gary Ridgway’s 71 victims. Regarded as the most prolific serial killer in American history, he received a sentence of life in prision in exchange for information about unsolved murders, including the location of remains.

While many of the victims’ family members decried the deal as failing to adequately punish him for his heinous crimes, Christian arrived at a different conclusion. He argues that “closure” is not an event that survivors experience upon execution of a perpetrator but that it is a process that occurs largely independent of the perpetrator’s punishment.

Please be sure to watch the full interview in the player at the top of the article to understand Christian’s perspective on the death penalty.

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