How to Save the World Using Your Desktop

“Half the world â€” nearly three billion people â€” live on less than two dollars a day” - World Bank

While statistics like that are disturbing, but if we all work together, we can make a difference. Here are a 3 ways to help you move in that direction.

Help the Needy: GoodSearch.com

Goodsearch is a search engine which shares fifty percent of the revenue generated from their advertisers with the charity, school or nonprofit organization of your choosing. The three things I like about this engine are:

Ability to choose the organisation you want to help and add charities not already listed
Transparency in accounts where all revenue generated and donated to any organisation is shared openly
Uses a Yahoo! powered search so quality is assured.

Currently the charities are based only in the US, with plans for international expansion in the future. Don’t however, let that stop you from helping global organisations like the WWF.

Cure Cancer: Folding [@] Home

Powerful computers are often underutilised, so this program harnesses your spare computing power and uses it run to run complex calculations, which are used to help the project’s goals.

Folding [@] Home is a distributed computing project where people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

Raise Money for a Specific Project: Fundable.org

Fundable lets groups of people pool funds to make purchases or raise money. Each group has a description of how much money needs to be collected and what it will do. Once enough pledges (not payments) have been collected, Fundable turns them into real payments and sends the total to the group organiser.

No one takes a risk when making a pledge: if a group’s project expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges and never charges money. It’s completely free to start a group. If (and only if) you succeed, Fundable charges 7%.

This is particularly useful for mini-fundraisers, and for organisations which don’t normally canvas for donations. In true Web 2.0 style, groups are public on the site, where people from around the globe can find and donate to your project.

Every small step we take makes a collective difference. The world doesn’t need Superman, it needs you.

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