nicefishfilms

It's now 20-10, time to get serious about progress. Time to see some real results in the effort to once and for all end extreme poverty for all mankind. I've spent years working with and monitoring some incredible NGO's and feel a great momentum in the right direction. The idea of Social Innovation, once foreign to most, is becoming a standard practice within my network of professional colleagues and friends. Every week we're reading of successes within ORG's that didn't even exist a few years ago. Did you see that Charity Water grew over 40% in a tough economy and raised more than $8.5 million for water projects and operations? How about The Millennium Development Goals Report from the UN that those living in extreme poverty dropped by a quarter from 1990 - 2005? Chances are, you're not aware of the progress being made in the fight for a better life around the globe. We are far from done but within striking distance. That's why I'm proposing a different way of looking at extreme problems facing Mankind. Perhaps it's time to adopt a new way of digesting the data, creating a score card and seeing this fight as a battle between two teams. Team 1 is Team mKind — all of us. The opposition is the forces that if left unchecked will run us out of existence.

We seem to comprehend sport scores pretty well. We understand that when it's Third with 5 yards to go you adjust the play. I think it's time that we put up the score, the push towards the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015. In searching for this comprehensive data, I've come up short. Are we afraid if we showed the progress this will cause us to decrease the sense of urgency? I'd like to think that if we put this in a different perspective we can cause those on the sidelines to join a winning team. If you knew that your efforts, time and money wasn't getting lost in a losing cause you'd keep the pressure on, right? What if we stopped thinking of this as a part-time initiative and made it the way we live?

A whole new generation is coming up through the ranks thinking about, acting and innovating the ways we approach the issue of extreme poverty. It's time to visualize the goal. This is where I need your help. Do you receive updates from your causes? I'd like to put as much information into a data base and link them to scoreboard for all to see. Are you aware of any global info tracking services that contain data sets like the one I'm talking about? Please send me the links.

I'm committing to reaching out at least once a month to the large network of blogs, media and producers to highlight progress we're making. I want us to put the data up for all to see— we can, we must win this (and we're getting closer.)



Today we have more tech, more funding, more concentrated actions by a widening group of really big-thinkers fighting this good fight. Let's see where we are, let's push this to the goal line. Far from a rah rah chant, I want to see us move down the field and share the playbook. Time to measure where we're at this time.

So I'm calling out to all the smart nodes— feed me data when you come across it. Push for progress reports and help us visualize it better.

msw