Blog Action Day 2008 is today

Image via WikipediaThis is the second time I'm participating in Blog Action Day; this year's topic is poverty. The idea of blog action day is to use the power of social media to increase awareness for the issue of poverty and to encourage a discussion. I'll use this post to promote Kiva, one of my favorite financial websites. Kiva supports entrepreneurs (mostly women) in emerging economies by providing peer-to-peer microcredits. The money is provided interest-free by people like you and me and is distributed and tracked by Kiva. I've made my first reinvestment on Kiva this year, after my support for a Popcorn maker was paid back in full. I encourage you all to support Kiva - with support from a lot of people they just won a $300,000 grant from American Express but they rely on people like us to keep them going.

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Blog action day 2008

This morning I got an email about blog action day 2008; I participated in this great initiative last year and decided to do so again. The idea is to use blogging as a means to highlight good causes. I will highlight two financial-related websites that I participate in: Prosper and Kiva. Whereas Prosper allows people with low credit scores in the US to solicit loans from others, Kiva enables micro entrepreneurs in the developing world to access Western capital. I've made loans on both and so far have received all the principal plus (in the case of Prosper) the interest back as promised. They're both great sites to make an impact with little capital and on Prosper you can probably make real money from giving out loans to well-performing borrowers. Another interesting play in this category is Virgin Money which faciliatetes lending from people you know and administers the process for you.
Enjoy these sites and good luck blog action day!