#plugintodevin - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

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Ellis Lucas is literally on a mission to save souls, sharing his personal faith in Jesus Christ with incarcerated addicts. A recovering addict himself, Ellis now uses the book he wrote to help struggling addicts develop a sense of personal worth and dignity.

The book started as a letter to his estranged son. The words just poured out of him as he sought to share his faith and hope with his adult son. They are still working to heal their relationship, but the book, The Potter and the Clay, has helped many others.

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Shane McKenna is a visionary entrepreneur and inventor who has turned his time and attention to ending world hunger. He’s created a patent-pending hydroponic gardening system that can help urban and rural people alike raise more food.

Now he’s raising money on Indiegogo to bring it to life, helping him to bring the device to market.

Ultimately, he plans to produce the devices in the developing countries where they will be sold. He sees a variety of uses but is most excited for the applications for people with the least access to adequate food, like refugees who not only may not have enough food but have nowhere to grow it either.

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Joanne Chiwaula, founder and director of the US-based nonprofit African Mothers Health Initiative and its sister organization Joyful Motherhood based in Malawi, works to save at risk babies. These include multiple births, babies who lost their mothers in childbirth and low birth weight babies.

So many babies born to mothers who die during childbirth die that a local tradition holds that they simply “choose to follow their mothers.” In fact, they fail to receive the vital nutrition that would come from nursing.

Similarly, low birth-weight babies may need more nutrition than they can get from a poorly nourished mother. Twins and triplets are also at risk as under-fed mothers may not be able to produce enough milk to multiple children.

To combat these problems--while always encouraging nursing where possible--African Mothers Health Initiative raises money to buy baby formula that is distributed in Malawi by Joyful Motherhood.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2I9m7zH.

You’ve probably heard of Kiva, but if you aren’t among the 1.7 million people who have made loans on the platform, you may not really know what it is. This crowdfunding platform is, in effect, a bank funded by people who lend their money with an expectation of losing only a little, to 2.9 million people who stand to gain a lot.

Kiva co-founder and president Premal Shah, 42, joined me for a conversation about the site and how it works to not just make loans but also to change lives in 85 countries around the world—including here in the US. Watch the interview in the player at top of the article.

Kiva lenders receive on average about 96% of their money back and agree not to receive interest. “It is done philanthropically,” Shah says. For many, presumably, it is their first impact investment.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2I9m7zH.

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

Still weak from her cancer treatment, 29-year-old Jenna Benn Shersher, now 36, asked her family, friends and followers to help her fight cancer. Wanting to dance but unable to do much on the dance floor, she made a quick video of herself doing the twist and challenged others to do the same. Thousands did.

That launched a movement that became a nonprofit organization she calls Twist Out Cancer.

The 501(c)(3) now has programs in Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Ann Arbor, Philadelphia and Tel Aviv.

While cancer-free for nearly seven years, Shersher describes her experience with cancer as “horrible.” Despite having the best medical care and a strong network of family and friends, she felt “this sort of overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness even though I had everything in my favor.”

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

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Shelby Hintze, a television producer for NBC-affiliate KSL’s “The Browser” and “Sunday Edition,” called on nonprofits to engage those they serve in leadership, including paid positions.

Hintze is a powerful, successful leader at KSL, but she acknowledges her vulnerabilities as a person with a form of muscular dystrophy. She notes that organizations sometimes miss the obvious because they fail to adequately engage those they serve.

If members of the community were serving on boards or in executive leadership, she says, the organizations would make better decisions for the people they hope to serve.

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Wind turbines are getting bigger and more efficient, now representing the cheapest form of energy on earth! In one corner of the industry, however, Dr. Daniel Farb has been working on little decorative turbines that can be installed on your roof.

These little guys aren’t as efficient as the big ones, but you can’t put a big one on your roof! His “flowers” can. And in some situations, he says, they may be as cost efficient--or more so--than rooftop solar.

To bring these to market, Farb has launched a crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine and has already raised over $130,000. He’s hoping now to raise over $1 million.

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Abby Levin and Lexi Thomas have devoted themselves to their nonprofit, Flowers for Powers, delivering flowers to people who need a lift. Inspired by the loss of both her grandmothers ten years ago, Abby and Lexi decided to spread joy.

Jumping on a trampoline in the backyard, they spotted flowers, crystallizing an idea. With donated flowers and low-cost vases, they deliver sunshine, most often to seniors, people in hospice care and others with grave diseases.

Their flowers bring joy but not because the flowers are so beautiful, it’s because they remind the recipient of the beautiful smiles of two remarkable girls who delivered them.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2x7dcuq.

Crowdfunding is no longer a novelty. It is part of the fabric of the global economy. Within that fabric, one of the brightly colored threads is Indiegogo, having helped entrepreneurs to raise over $1.5 billion.

As I’ve followed the company and its work over the years, I’ve had some favorite social impact projects. One stands out: Solar Roadways. Scott and Julie Brusaw of Sandpoint, Idaho—as small and remote a town as you might imagine—came up with the idea to make solar panels rugged enough to drive on, while incorporating a variety of features like snow melting and LED lighting that would allow an operator to change traffic patterns. The idea was too novel (read, crazy) for any traditional investor, the sort of person the Brusaws had likely never met, anyway. So, in 2014, they launched a campaign on Indiegogo and raised $2,284,774. Today, the solar panels are in production.

Indiegogo has created a platform for entrepreneurs of all stripes—including social entrepreneurs like the Brusaws—to fund projects that would likely have been funded in no other way. Not everyone who tries to raise money is successful. Not everyone who raises money is successful at accomplishing what they set out to do. Still, the entrepreneurial ecosystem has been forever changed by Indiegogo and crowdfunding.

Scott McIntyre, president of the Crowdfunding Profe

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2x7dcuq.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2N1lRZf.

Kestrel Linder, now 34, and his friends got chatting about how successful they were as they reached their 30s and yet were still not giving back to their alma maters. “That seemed odd to us,” he said.

“We had high paying jobs few of us had debt and if we did have debt paying off the debt was not a particularly big challenge for us and we all loved school or schools that we went to,” he continued. So, he did some research and found that over the past 20 years, a declining percentage of people in virtually every demographic have been giving to educational institutions.

“That struck us as a pretty big problem,” he said, as he described his motivation for creating GiveCampus, a “digital fundraising” platform as he calls it; the users interviewed for this article all describe it as a crowdfunding platform. Semantics aside, he and his team wanted to increase giving to education.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2N1lRZf.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.