How one school is getting kids fired up about climate solutions

For-profit companies are making good private schools available even to Africa’s poor. They can do it – and can do it on an enormous scale – by hiring neighborhood residents to teach, and scripting out every word of every lesson on an e-reader.

In Oakland, a company created an online crowdfunding platform that allows users to earn interest by financing clean energy projects and gives people with good social intentions a direct line of action. Across the world, there is a growing movement toward people-powered clean energy.

Can we improve the methods we use to teach math in schools — so that everyone develops proficiency? A grade-school math program is changing how children learn based on the assumption that all children can achieve a high level of understanding.

Funding with too many strings attached makes it hard for non-profits to grow and be impactful. An American organization, Nonprofit Finance Fund (N.F.F.) Capital Partners division, is finding ways to finance non-profits likes companies and has already shown great success in pilot situations.

The company that manufactures Lifestraw, a water purification device, has found a way to distribute their product to impoverished Kenyan families for free, while still making a profit. In the global carbon credit market, businesses receive carbon credits for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These credits can then be sold to companies who need to offset their carbon emissions, allowing green companies to make a profit off of their small ecological footprint.

Attending college is not always a given option for gifted teenagers from less-than-wealthy backgrounds. National organization QuestBridge creates a way for low-income and minority high-achieving students to go to their dream colleges free of cost.

Lack of reading material is not only a third-world problem – many poor families in the United States lack access to and funds for books. A program that helps get books to into the homes of low-income families can boost literacy, and help publishers, too.

In combatting poverty, a giant informal economic system has quietly emerged in Africa. Women participate in micro-finance organizations that loan money in order to allow them to create businesses and become self-managing.

Through creative financing and new technology, a non-profit in San Francisco is making farmers markets more accessible to residents who rely on federal nutrition benefits.

PowerMyLearning, a program that any student, parent, or teacher can use for free, helps students take ownership of their own learning. When most attention is being placed on teacher effectiveness, this program redirects those efforts toward students.