Having been a banker for about 14 years of my career, I have found my new favorite dot org.

THEIR MISSION:

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.

THEIR BELIEFS:

• People are by nature generous, and will help others if given the opportunity to do so in a transparent, accountable way.
• The poor are highly motivated and can be very successful when given an opportunity.
• By connecting people we can create relationships beyond financial transactions, and build a global community expressing support and encouragement of one another.

THEY PROMOTE:

• Dignity: Kiva encourages partnership relationships as opposed to benefactor relationships. Partnership relationships are characterized by mutual dignity and respect.
• Accountability: Loans encourage more accountability than donations where repayment is not expected.
• Transparency: The Kiva website is an open platform where communication can flow freely around the world.

JUST AS OF THIS WEEK (for this week)…HERE ARE THE STATS:

• $1,844,575 lent out
• 1 loan every 11 seconds
• 24,690 lenders made loans
• 4,360 entrepreneurs were funded
• 98.99% REPAYMENT RATE TO DATE

Here is my lender profile EBROUSSARD …you can be a lender by signing up HERE and lend as little as $25. You get to pick the people and the business that you make the loan to…that’s kind of cool! Also join my lending team called the Kingdom Builders.

Remember you are making a loan…not giving your money away!

Don’t you want to be the bank?

So in the July/August edition of COLLIDE magazine, there was a lead article titled “Weapons of Choice”. They had asked a few creative guys to share some of the tools they use as they go about their day. Kind of the things that make their job/life either easier or keeps them on track.

It got me to thinking…what are those things for me?

In this world where change has come at us at light speed and modes of connecting with other people are continually being rewritten, what are the things I use to keep up with what is going on in the world, with friends and family and the tools I use to simply get things accomplished?

Here are a few things that I use throughout my day…

Lenovo ThinkPad laptop - It is the center of input and output of most of my day. Moved from being a 10+ year Dell customer when Dell moved to India. Lenovo is solid but I still am struggling with the reliability of Windows and Internet Explorer. Will most likely go MacBook next.

iPhone 3GS – Left Blackberry and have never looked back! Did not dream they were that far behind in the smart phone war. Not only am I amazed at what this thing can do but how easy it is to use. Email is the engine of most of what I do…with the iPhone that is made easy and quick.

iPad – I spent the first 2 months trying  to figure out what it was that I was going to do on the iPad that I couldn’t do on my laptop or the iPhone. It is a piece of hardware that is truly new to this world (something we have never used before). It has now become my all-in-one reading device. It is where I get the news, read blogs, read the Bible and take care of my social connections along with any Internet use outside of weekday business hours. It is new now…but this type of device will be huge!

Google – iGoogle is one of my home pages. All in one page I have current news, weather, a market summary and about 16 other things just in case I need them. Within one click I have front page headlines from about 5 cities that interest me, access to a summary of the some 85 blogs I follow (in Google Reader) and news from across the country on about 5 or 6 very specific subjects that interest me. Wow…I didn’t even mention Gmail, calendar,and Google Analytics.

Microsoft Outlook with Mailstreet – Mailstreet syncs everything from my Outlook (mail, contacts, calendar, notes) with my laptop, iPhone and iPad instantly and seamlessly! Enough said…

Hootsuite – This is my other home page (you can have more than one). Hootsuite brings together in one place my Linkedin, facebook and my twitter accounts. It is a killer time saver.

WordPress – I discovered WordPress when I started blogging a little more than a year ago and I continue to be amazed at what you can do with it. You can design some very cool looking stuff and not know the first thing about code.  I have put together two other blogs/websites recently and would be happy to help you…should you get the itch to start blogging. More on blogging in another post.

Let me close with those 7.

I wonder what that list would have looked like 10 years ago?

I really wonder what that list will look like 10 years from now!

Do you use any  of the above…what would be on your weapon list?

©iStockphoto.com/Warchi

I grew up in a wonderful little town in the panhandle of Texas (population 2000). It was the world for me. I could ride my bike across town to my friend’s houses and I played every sport in school (so we could field a team)…not much happened in town without everybody knowing. That all changed after my freshman year of high school when we moved to a city where my new high school had 2000 kids! I spent a year making my parents pay for the move all the while desperately planning the return to my comfortable world.

I made the return trip to west Texas by going to college in Lubbock at Texas Tech University. I was excited but still very much apprehensive about moving to such a big city. After graduating, I married and moved to the METROPLEX of Dallas/Fort Worth to take a job in banking. I still remember the joy of being newly married and getting an incredible job, but there were still large clouds of anxiety given the new world I was moving into.

None of those changes compared to the monumental change I have been going through for about a year and a half now…my move into the world of Social Media.

The size, and more importantly, the impact that Social Media is having (and will continue having) on my life already surpasses all of the physical moves I have made up to this point. That’s without having to send out a single “change of address”…much less loading and unloading the moving van. As with the other moves, it has not been without tremendous fear and doubt. Questions like…

• Am I giving up my privacy?
• Why would anyone else care what I think?
• Is this all a waste of time?

…have haunted me for about a year. You see, I am a Baby Boomer. Not many of my peers have jumped over to the other side of this new world with both feet.  Why would they?  For forty-something years…their window to the rest of the world was delivered to their front yard rolled up with a rubber band while they slept; it’s very hard to let that go. It’s extremely hard to grasp how close you are to the rest of the world…inside of your house!  

Social Media has taught me some things that I saw in other places but didn’t fully grasp…things like:

• The true value of people’s stories
• The incredible power of sharing information
• The ability to meet the needs of others on the other side of the world… with only a  click
• The fragile art of connecting to others

Though at times, my moves have been a scary and sometimes lonely trek, as with all of the other moves I have made in my life (with the exception of the first), I have never wanted to go back!

The crazy thing is that this giant Social Media movement is the very thing that has allowed me to reconnect to all the people and places that I used to know…

Have you ever moved? Was it scary?