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Everyone seems to want in on it. Even my septuagenarian neighbor who recently retired from her position as a clerk has taken up trading cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin jumped in value more than 50% in October alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being raised in new coin offerings every month. This surprising source of capital may be a natural match for social entrepreneurs.

Dan Bates, 60, the founder, president and CEO of ImpactPPA is now conducting presales in anticipation of a $50 million initial coin offering or ICO in the coming weeks. Bates has been doing clean energy projects in the developing world for a decade but ImpactPPA is a new business.

It will use not one but two cryptocurrencies. The first, a utility token, it calls NRG will be used to sell the electricity it produces on micro-grids and small utility-scale solar and wind projects. The second token, MPAQ, the one that will be offered in the ICO, will give the holders a voice in selecting the next projects. In part to avoid securities issues, MPAQ holders will not receive ownership or dividends.

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"I look for a great communicator who can tell some of the most important stories in the world. Also, someone who won't complain about staying in a $2-a-night room with rats and roaches," New York Times columnist Nick Kristof summarized by email what he looks for in his annual "Win-a-Trip" contest.

Each year, Kristof of the New York Times holds a "Win-a-Trip" contest to find a student journalist to travel with him on a reporting trip. For 2017, he selected Aneri Pattani to accompany him to Liberia.

Pattani, 22, described her experience as a "one of the best" she's had.

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We’re all familiar with payday lenders who are providing loans to people who can least afford it at interest rates that shock the greediest of corporate bankers. Can a fintech company that lends at rates up to 200% annual percentage rates ever be considered ethical? In this piece, I’m going to share my conclusion.

To help me make this evaluation, I turned to Morgan Simon, a vocal advocate for using a social justice lens for impact investing. She is the author of Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change and Managing Director of Candide Group. She framed the question for me:

In general, when we think about fintech, from microfinance in the global south to financial services for working class populations in the US, we think a lot about the question of fairness. It’s common for a social enterprise to focus on providing better rates to a customer compared to what they had access to. But better does not always mean fair. So, we always look at a company and try to assess--is the financing non-extractive, meaning the customer receives more value than the company? Is the operating margin reasonable compared to the consumer value created? Does the product help build assets as opposed to focusing predominately on consumption? Each company and case is different, and hence it’s impossible to say that a certain range of APRs enables fairness. It’s important to take each company case-by-case and try to assess its particular impact.

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One of the most controversial topics in impact investing is whether it is possible or fair to expect market returns on investments that do good. Gloria Nelund, chairman and CEO of TriLinc Global, says yes.

Nelund says her firm, which manages about $320 million, is designed to prove it. “The whole firm is really dedicated to creating and sponsoring funds that will prove to investors that they don't have to give up investment returns to do good.”

TriLinc is a private investment fund that lends money to small businesses, including businesses in the developing world. To do business effectively in frontier and emerging markets, the firm partners with local experts.

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Fifty bucks and five minutes will make you an impact investor. I did it. So can you.

Swell Investing is a new impact investing platform created by social intrapreneur Dave Fanger, 40, of Pacific Life. The idea came, Fanger says, five years ago, thinking about how consumers were increasingly making buying decisions based on social impact and thought there ought to be a way for investors to do the same.

What he came up with incorporated the latest fintech tools for investing, commonly known as robo-advisors paired with impact data to make informed decisions about impact. The technology allows for accounts as small as $50 with annual fees of just 75 basis points or 37.5 cents on a $50 account.

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Meghan Waldron is 15 years old, runs track for her high school, plays in the school orchestra and is working on a novel. She is remarkable in many ways. One way is that she has progeria, a condition so rare only about 300 kids in the world have it; few are expected to live past their 20th birthday--unless promising new treatments are found.

Waldron recently completed her first book, a children's book called Running on the Wind about a bird born under a rock that doesn't learn to fly but instead to run.

The book was published by The Red Fred Project, a nonprofit publishing company that helps "children who live in extraordinary circumstances" like Waldron's to create a children's book that will both serve as an adult-like achievement to bring a sense of fulfillment to their lives and as a lasting legacy, evidence that their short lives mattered. The company has now published ten books, is working on an 11th and on a plan to publish many more in the future.

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The fleeting memories of her childhood didn’t make sense until her mother told her the story of the poverty they’d experienced when Sheryle Gillihan was just a toddler. Now a CEO serving people experiencing poverty, she says she’s “come full circle.”

As the head of Causelabs, a public benefit corporation that provides strategy, design, prototyping and software development services, she is focusing the social enterprise on reaching profitability while staying true to the mission and values of the business.

The company finished 2016 with $1.7 million in revenue, an office in Denver and 16 employees. She says the company has pared expenses, including the office in Denver to give the firm a fighting chance at 2017 profitability.

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Alex Scott, the second child and only daughter among four children, must have been born in 1996 with the genes of a social entrepreneur. Her resilience and her perseverance are the hallmarks of almost all successful entrepreneurs.

Born prematurely, she manifested her fighting spirit immediately, defying the odds and quickly earning the right to leave the hospital. Her mother, Liz Scott, now 47, says it was a glimpse of what was to come.

Before her first birthday, Alex was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a pediatric cancer. She would battle the cancer for the rest of her short life, about seven and a half more years.

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Three impact investment players provide an interesting view of the broader impact investing ecosystem and how all the parts work together. Their approach helps to make capital more available to social entrepreneurs and investment opportunities open to more investors, including some ordinary investors.

The three include Impact Assets, New Media Ventures and Better Ventures. Impact Assets, a nonprofit asset manager holding exclusively philanthropic capital, serves as a hub in this part of the impact investing world. New Media Ventures and Better Ventures use Impact Assets in strategic but almost opposite ways.

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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimates that "roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted."

Recognizing the journalistic injunction to avoid hyperbole, that truly is an enormous problem.

Justin Kamine, his brother Matthew and his father Hal determined that was just what they were looking for: an enormous opportunity. The Kamines have been developing infrastructure scale-projects since the senior Hal got into the cogeneration business in the mid-80s.

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