Club of New York is one of 100 Collaboration City searching for 7 Future Capitalism goals to transparently unite the human race on sustainability's rising exponential by 2015. Jon us info@worldcitizen.tv - DC yes we can bureau 301 881 1655
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Sunday, March 22, 2009

wall street's triply destructive system

what they neither taught, nor valued nor marketed at wall street

1 List what metrics exist on specific community weaknesses nationwide or on individual communities you wish to help



2 The good news is that a detected community weakness is also an opportunity to design jobs community most need –an ungreen community needs green, a community which has low prospects for children needs more quality jobs/system designed round kids etc



3 Moreover the broader system methods of bangladeshi’s 33 years experience of microcredit and www social business designs provide choices of community entrepreneurial solutions specific to what the community weakness is

in searching social business competition winners bordering on renewable energy I quickly get out of my depth technically

-this is one example http://www.wilsonturbopower.com/wtp_pdfs/WTP_PR092208gt.pdf earlier in the decade it was one of the leading social entrepreneur competition winners across universities and it is still MIT linked a space several of us our keep an eye on mainly because of microcredit education and new career/job-creation interests - I am wondering whether its the sort of case our extended collaborations ought to be tracking

its also the case that the Yunus challenge at MIT this year at is on renewable energy so there may be some // cases, or opportunities to make connections in MIT if we can find a way to link in a technical person; in // peter ryan has been mentioning search for most relevant biofuel for malawi -not sure where that project has reached

I notice that cousteau's grandson Phillippe (in paul roses' bbc tv oceans team) is featured in a current article on wind turbine experiments up and down the east coast with new york mayor bloomberg apparently cheering on other east coast mayors (see attached)- incidentally peter B attended the last refilt of the boat that cousteau used to film from

another dc based person is neville williams who was originally hoping to be part of carter's ! solar challenge but as that evaporated applied solar in india etc and is author of chasing the sun

thanks to continuously superb conferences that heather is events mamanger at www.cgdev.org it became clear to me this week that one has become accidntally the bipartisan action network oc choice connecting community usa - it spent the 21 months of the election campaign teasing candiadates on both sides on those green and other issues that will not be communally sustained until the parties come together - it probably has more reach on main street for replicating than any american movement (though I keep looking as to whether anyone is helping to connect univesrity students rather than keep them boxed into local professorial circuits)

also does ashden have a network agent in usa east coast

there seems to be a gap between developing world solar and what could be 5 million green community jobs obama has been talking about; working out whether bangladesh wants to be a player in this will be useful; peter burgess is checking whether we can re-establish contact with amy wilson who used to agent for grameen energy in new york but this was part of vidar jorgensen's grameen america division which seemed to have been restructured (vidar is boston based but we havent quite found a way to collaborate with him as number 1 partner search person between bangladesh and usa which he does primarily in healthcare areas ); I dont know if marriah and tara's 250 people brainstorm or reinvent your career will have a green subnetwork but I would be intersted in helping sponsor such a track sometime if we could get 250 people in new york revisiting their own careers in green banking- a gap i believe there is a market for staging if we connected our actions -perhaps the 92Y would be the place to convene that unless www.solar1.org is large enough

MICROENERGYSUMMIT -what BHAG collaboration goal do we set for 2015?
probably the most exciting live connection between bangladesh, usa and developing world solar is the seattle-based deveopment of market for 250 million clean energy households- this gives moble gadgets to microcredits to audit bottom billion households converting off carbon (eg to biogas and solar) so that aggregate results can be traded on carbon offset markets http://microenergycredits.com the lady at centre of this is one of dipal barua's founding solar team of bangladesh from origin of their work in 1996

a lot of links start to map round green future capitalism celebrates yes we can- but if we dont start bridging them, not certain who will -interested to hear other views on that! dont want to reinvent any wheels if these connections are already being made- if april 14 new york cafe is an opportunity to issue any optimistic invites to potentially green networks around new york please tell me who I should cheekily mail-
eg anyone at ted.com, or acumen , or buckminster fuller or ...

in the ten or years since my dc neighbour harrison owen has influenced me on networks concerned with system transformation http://openspaceworld.com - the invitation process of open space has become the one I revel in

chris
http://clubofnewyork.blogspot.com

Saturday, March 21, 2009

club of bronx
http://www.bronxarts.net/index.php?view=85 charter school
majorie carter south bronx
lehman/yunus collaboration cafe

club of queens
york college - yunus
grameen americ jackso heights
asa international

club of manhattan
http://solar1.org

Bangladeshi Microcredit
– The best sustainability investment systems women & children can get

THE TRAGIC LOCAL IGNORANCE OF GLOBAL ECONOMISTS
The standard theories of the majority of economics journalists and academics are now known to have been anything but transparently on the side of human beings for over a decade. http://transparency.tv Even so, the nonsense these noisy people propagate in mass media and academic journals on Bangladeshi microcredit impacts way beyond the normal dismal consequences that richer nations have until recently been accustomed to.

There are a lot of international implementations that claim to be inspired by Bangladeshi microcredit but which break fundamental rules integral to the Bangladeshi franchise systems. Such false imitations of microcredit merit fierce and open criticism. Conversely as Bill Clinton has bravely pointed out- the 3 major Bangladeshi microcredit systems are generating the majority of its developing economy. The local story is almost miraculous and shows what compound whole truth of purpose can do and network from one community to the next.

Bangladesh is the nation which started as the world’s poorest when born to independence just over a third of a century ago. Thanks to microcredit systems Bangladesh has been sustaining growth over decades and it is irrefutably a world leader in achieving local millennium goals. As if this wasn’t good enough reason for humanity in a social networking age to need to relate to simple microeconomics truths of Bangladesh’s free market to end poverty, it turns out that the Bangladesh microcredit systems provide unique clues –as well as a national history of social business entrepreneurial maps - on how to resolve the main fallibilities that are causing the global banking system to crash in ever more viciously expensive ways.

BANGLADESH ’S MICROCREDIT 1-2-3

The 3 main Bangladesh microcredit systems serve wholly different segments. That means they are best in kind at what they do, but it is mathematical illiteracy to make competitive comparisons between them or tabulate international mixes. It is also the case that at least two of the three systems are as much lifelong collaboration entrepreneur clubs that members are invited to communally join as they are “banks” –at least in the western meaning of this word

For about 14 years, from 1976, Grameen pioneered the only major microcredit system. Its service offer was designed for some of the poorest and most abused women on the planet. Join the Grameen club and we will empower you to become independent income generators; you will have peer to peer support structures both for becoming businesswomen and supporting your choice of what community safety and future sustainability priorities are needed. Where innovative solutions are required on life-critical needs, Grameen’s entrepreneurs will develop community-wide solutions. The whole organization will be owned equally by the poorest members. The way to join Grameen involves taking out typically a small loan to start up your income generation for weekly repayment over a year, but your friendly bankers will demand no collateral, no legal contracts. They trust your own ability, and the whole community support system that is Grameen’s responsibility for designing simply and effectively. Before Grameen was granted an unique constitution to operate a rural bank in 1983, it had already surveyed emerging members on goals that they defined as ending poverty communally over a generation. 16 decisions to do with education of children, basic health and safety became the moral contract between members and Grameen’s leadership purpose.

To this day, the 16 decisions explain the Grameen culture of never being satisfied with the managers of each and every one of its 2000+ branches unless that operation positively discriminates towards including the poorest in its reach. And there are now over 25 services beyond the original microloans that Grameen’s entirety as a service network integrates round social business models. All social businesses are defined to be owned by the membership. As businesses they are designed to sustain positive cashflow. However the surplus is reinvested back in the purpose of the business or its replication so that its distribution ultimately reaches every community where it can make a difference to members and their childrens’ lives.

If you ask Dr Yunus about ending poverty, he will say loans for income generation are a human right but microcredit’s hi-trust relationship networking also opens the door to generating all micro-services of life-critical importance. 33 years after the first microcredit experiments, Grameen is a living laboratory of health and safety, education, media and energy innovations unlike any bank a westerner will have met. Consider just 4 of Grameen’s social business threads – two which emerged as locally critical early on, two that are the cause of entrepreneurial revolutions http://erworld.tv of worldwide import as their sustainability exponentials have compounded since 1996

1 Early on Grameen became the largest seed distributor in Bangladesh . Why because Dr Yunus’ staff noted that village children had night blindness. They were told this was because of vitamin deficiency which Grameen’s members could cure if they planted carrots. So Grameen sold the tiniest and so lowest unit cost packs of seeds ever marketed!

2 Grameen’s rule is that credit is for either income generation or a life-critical purchase not superficial consumption. Within years of its constitution, Grameen won an Aga Khan award for architecture. The story of Grameen’s entry into sub sub prime is this. The government was issuing house-building aid to so-called poor people. However its definition of houses were far too expensive for rural villagers. What these families needed was the minimum design of monsoon-proof roof over their head and a pit latrine. Grameen developed the lowest-cost structural design and a credit policy for paying back the cost of the house in under 5 years. In line with the 16 decisions, it also insisted that to qualify for a loan the property right had to be turned over to the woman. Prior to this a man only had to tell his wife she was divorced and she had to leave forthwith. Now if the man in the household did that, he had to leave! Grameen members have successfully completed quarter of a million sub sub prime mortgages without one foreclosure.

3 1996 saw the start up of 2 most visionary community entrepreneur investments ever made by and for poor people – the now famous mobile telephone lady and the as yet little known fact that Grameen members now install more solar units than the whole of the USA. Prior to 1996 Grameen had evolved round nearly 100,000 village centres (meeting places owned by the women) where up to 60 members met. Their knowhow was only connected as far as cross-fertilization of grameen’s service employees could manage. Once every village had a shared mobile phone – an intervention which must have been as revolutionary as a telegram office in the wild west of the 19th century – vital information started to be networked all across 100,000 hubs. Moreover Grameen and partners picked up the mobile franchise at cents in the dollar as global consultants were an order of magnitude out in predicting the market size of mobile phones in what they analysed as the world’s poorest nation. Today, Grameen Phone is the largest corporate tax payer in the nation and the Grameen share is owned by its 7 million women entrepreneurs. In the case of Grameen renewable energy http://www.gshakti.org , the plan is to create 100000 green jobs in the villages by 2012, as well as to demonstrate how any sunshine state can develop a thriving carbon-negative economy. This is most important to Bangladesh as the first 100+ million nation likely to be washed away if our global policies continue to melt the world’s ice and raise sea levels

2 BRAC spent most of Bangladesh ’s first 2 decades developing healthcare and primary education services. Alongside this it started developing at least 3 industry sectors to be owned bottom-up by the poorest women : poultry, other livestock, silk farming and fashions. When BRAC started microcredit around 1990, we can well imagine its main focus was to empower individuals to start up businesses which contributed to these industry sectors. Unlike Grameen, BRAC’s constitution was not restricted to village banking. Its own use of information technology has always been at the infrastructure level first as opposed to Grameen’s delivery to end users in the community. Thus BRAC became a leader in automating banking transactions. It now runs a for-profit city banking chain alongside its microcredit to end rural poverty

3 ASA has also existed as a social services network since the 1970s but around 1990 it entered and then focused entirely on microbanking. Unlike Grameen or BRAC, it does not itself design entrepreneurial franchises beyond pure financial services. It is primarily banking for those among the individual poor who after 20 years of communally operated microcredit now want to be served individually without the need of peer support groups or village-wide goals. Potentially, ASA is the nearest system design the West may compare to what Main Street might want from local banks on the side of investing in the productivity of the customer as well as the hi-trust community-building which families need invested in.

This brief review does not begin to indicate the worldwide potential for sustainability investment understanding which Bangladesh microcredit models are now interacting with our digital age. For example, India and Bangladesh are teaming up to develop the next generation of mobile microbanking http://bankabillion.org so that the costs of basic banking become 10 times less to operate. Kenya ’s leading microcredit http://jamiibora.org was born after the age of mobile connectivity. In under a decade its 300000 members (doubling almost annually) have become the world’s leading example of microcredit that empowers job creation among slum youth as well as rural women. The Oscar-winning moving slumdog millionaire doesn’t begin to tell how exciting Jamii Bora's story and contribution to ending poverty can be.

Other microcredit channels that have a long reputation of being both transparent measurers and bottom-up agencies are now hi-trust networking’s perfect partners for co-creating free markets with mobiles. http://microenergycredits.com forms partnerships between local microcredits and small scale solar suppliers; by aggregating how many households can verifiably be identified as zero-carbon users, carbon credit markets can return the value to the poorest who make the changeover to renewable energy. MEC is determined to make a clean energy market between 250 million households worldwide in time to celebrate other 2015 millennium goals. CEO leaders networks clustered around John Mackey are celebrating sustainable capitalism’s development of fair trade partnerships with the support of local microcredits http://wholeplanetfoundation.org (See also the new book - Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the Worlds Problems (Hardcover) by Michael Strong , John Mackey )

INDUSTRY SECTOR RESPONSIBILITY
Dr Yunus’s own new book “Creating a world without poverty –Social Business, Future of Capitalism” reviews the third of a century through which Bangladesh became the most collaborative innovator and economic social business networker. Since winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr Yunus has upped the challenge. How about playing Future Capitalism games and all types of media celebrating them more tham March Madness or four-yearly Olympics? The first FC game involves heroic innovation partnerships matching the world’s most resourced organizations and deepest grassroots networks. The search is on for service solutions to the most life-critical needs which an industry sector is uniquely capable of. Why would a global corporation spend a billion dollars on image-making campaigns when it faces this outstanding media opportunity reality-making? Worldwide youth and free markets of ending poverty can now celebrate a global company’s reputation gain for helping innovate the most responsible innovation its sector can create, while the poorest own the social business so that sustainable surpluses are invested back in replicating a life-saving solution. About 20 such goodwill multiplying partnerships have begun during the first year of Dr Yunus launching the challenge of Future Capitalism partnering http://www.yunuspartners.com

Yes this generation can make and celebrate our networking space race as that of ending poverty. We will need to replace historically backward looking economics analysts by true future capitalism reporters. These will typically be youthful visitors of local contexts of grassroots microcredit. Those whose peers share the love of mapping how sustainable microeconomics win-win-wins and how social business networks multiply exponentials up over longer periods of time than the quarterised MBA mindsets know. Help us log up a 1000 replicable social business franchises at http://socialbusiness.tv ; join in demanding an annual yearbook on Future Capitalism edited out of Dhaka as world’s number 1 sustainability investment city. RSVP info@worldcitizen.tv with a more exciting way of seeing what future generation investment in people instead of yesterday’s machines can truly credit.

The world of 2009 has been described by President Obama as one in which global top-down has been proven not to work. Microeconomists and entrepreneurial revolutionaries have 33 years of experiments in choosing another way that are waiting to be open sourced worldwide. This is in all probability the year we breach irreversibility’s tipping point - if we fail to unite in valuing how to prevent a decade-long slump and potential loss of human sustainability. To microeconomists evidence of the need for a new capitalism has been compounding since 1976- not just in the practice of Dr Yunus -and 200000 plus sustainability investment microbankers of Bangladesh - but in the surveys of Entrepreneurial Revolution published from the Christmas 1976 issue of The Economist. When a networking generation wants to integrate more value than zero-sum globalization, the entrepreneurial “must” is to go micro and then open source solutions that microentrpreneurially work- replicating them anywhere that societies want to test them transparently.

Future Capitalism - Yes We Can Unite in Do This Now
http://muhammadyunus.org/content/view/194/128/lang,en/ . What John Lennon could only imagine, President Obama is uniquely qualified to help action as a son of microcredit, and with his fatherland of Kenya Jamii Bora providing a template which in Africa ’s context can value multiply even more job creation than Grameen. Do we not owe Dr Yunus’ and the Bangladesh nation’s open invitation to end poverty the human values of whole hearted networking transparency and true grassroots empowerment? Wouldn’t it be far less wasteful than bailing out (so far 13 trillion dollars of ) big banking and insurance systems whose global mis-economy has already overshot the claim –let alone humanity’s credit - of being too big to fail?

Friday, March 20, 2009

social business or microfinance models for and with 3rd age groups

one of the magic potentials of sustainable micro value exchanges is brilliantly human system design round detailed stuff that big picture global ideas men (until recently new york's number 1 speciality) never realise is needed in their own backyard until they retire into their community or become redunadant cos surprtise suprisie main street didnt need most of the creative fiancial accounting that the world's biggest clients went into soom unreall groupie lovefest over

here's a very micro case of peter B - you can bet it appies as much if not more to new york as anywhere else in the union

peter has met a medical expert who has data on how in many parts of the country half of all nurses will pass retirement agent in next 10 years

equally needs of the old get greater and greater

how about some sort of affinity credit union that is as much about matching up the nurses with the old as giving them loans to market themselves or negotiating both a fair rate of pay and some subsidies for the that part of the old who cant afford to pay -or in social business one rich elder pays for one elder too but still gets a better nursing/companion service than a for profit agency that doensn't care (or is maximising its own extractions from exchanges) between nurses and elders

sounds like a franchise that if we could prove it anywhere would be a god-send for obama to repicate compared with other ways of spending government money

I expect this demo-swap of communities in need and there being ample but not officially marketed help is an area that usa microcredit needs to design frachises for

contact peterB (via info@worldcitizen.tv if you dont already know this new york expert in community) if you agree this is an applied community microcredit whicjh matches yes we can networking goals

http://clubofnewyork.blogspot.com

Worldwide, club of city supports collaboration and networkers: to pose serious questions, notably on future curves that seem to be trending down in many places and communities. How do all peoples and media 1 2 3 turnround such examples as:
  • Healthcare – ever increasing costs
  • Children – increased family strain, lost safety of community
  • Professionals- loss of Hippocratic oath, ever more bureaucratic
  • Water – Clean water is getting scarcer
  • Transport – getting slower
  • National Government – Increasingly powering over instead of facilitating what people need next Mass media – dumbing down, loss of social space and transparent debates
  • Food chain – cost of good for you food going up
  • Nations Cultures- love of each other’s diversity going down
  • Pensions (investment in sustainable growth) – going down
  • Adult confidence in making a difference with lifelong learning potentials – seems to be going down
  • Insurance – cost going up, learnings across biggest tragedies seem increasingly blocked
  • Underclass – compounding underclass- their loss of hope in life and mutual risks to all of us in a hi-connected world
  • NGOs/Charity – Global*Local infrastructure further removed from depth of grassroots needs in crisis or sustainability turnround challenges
    We are interested in any city network that either recognises any of these as a problem which it wants to question or has some answers they are happy to share with the world
    Chris Macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk, London & DC, 30 years at origin of Entrepreneurial Revolution, 21 years @ Death of Distance transparency networking, valuetrue mapmaking 1