Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Can Coffee Kick-Start an Economy?

    African coffee growers sell their raw beans cheaply to traders, earning very little for their work. The creator of Good African Coffee in Uganda was able to sell the first African roasted coffee internationally by selling consumers the story of the coffee.

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  • Prizes With an Eye Toward the Future

    Agencies across the corporate, government, and nonprofit sectors are recruiting ideas from the public by offering prizes for solving challenges. Prize incentives have spurred innovation for centuries, but fell out of favor as the preferred method in the 1800s. Now, prize-based incentives are back, in part because of a flood of new philanthropic money, and because prizes cast a wider net to a largely more educated and tech-savvy global population.

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  • On the Road, and Out of the Red

    More Than Wheels, a New Hampshire-based non-profit offers an economically stable solution to the high cost of owning a car. The program offers low-cost car loans that go toward the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles.

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  • Out of Poverty, Family-Style

    A non-traditional program called the Family Independence Initiative (F.I.I.), uses a radically different approach from the traditional American social service model to empower entire families alleviate themselves from poverty. The results in multiple states thus far have been so striking, that this model of self-sufficiency may be able to have a significant impact reducing poverty nationwide.

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  • Instead of Student Loans, Investing in Futures

    For millions of students who could succeed in college, the limiting factor is money. Is it possible to finance higher education the way we finance start-up companies? A company called Lumni uses “human capital contracts” to offer loans for students contingent upon 14 percent of the student's salary for 118 months after graduation. There are risks to this approach and not a lot of years or data available to be sure of its efficacy, but results are promising already—with a default rate under 3 percent.

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  • Doing More Than Praying for Rain

    Most insurance companies avoid insuring poor farmers because the transaction costs are too high, but a non-profit in Kenya created a sustainable way to cover them.

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  • Social Entrepreneur Peru: Albina Ruiz and the Ciudad Saludable

    Albina Ruiz, founder of the social enterprise Ciudad Saludable, works with people living in areas dominated by the trash dump to create a more formal system of waste removal for their health and the wider city's cleanliness. Workers who collect and recycle the waste are now employed by the city, own a micro-business, and no longer work under a social stigma. At the same time their efforts to clean up the city are working well, and the model is spreading to other Peruvian cities.

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  • Grocery cooperatives help keep small towns alive

    Anita, Iowa faced many of the same challenges as other small towns when the last local grocer closed amid competition with large chains like Costco and Walmart. But when its residents realized the value of a local "mom-and-pop" food purveyor to the town's economy, they created the Anita Grocery Cooperative and a board to oversee it. The Coop marks a testament to collective action, resilience, and sustainable, locally-sourced solutions.

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