In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
I started the Pies Descalzos foundation in Colombia when I was 18, and since then I have been very involved in the crusade for education.
I have my own foundation, which I just started, called Believe Anything Is Possible, which is going to be an organization to help the underprivileged.
I think we really feel like Crowdrise could be something that, 20 years from now, people take for granted because that's just how you do it, like if you're going to raise money for something, that's how you do it.
Never again will NAACP find itself near financial ruin.
Many of the wonderful achievements of the 20th century were the result of the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery has led to profits becoming a dirty word. Nonprofit is seen as more righteous, particularly when people pompously stand before us and declare, 'We're a nonprofit organization.'
I started a nonprofit called The Pegasus Fund, and we take top-performing students from underserved communities, and we commit to sending them for three summers to a nonacademic, holistic summer camp as a means to help them acclimate socially, geographically, spiritually to pilot secondary schools that they hope to attend.
Sometime ago, I teamed up with a former Marine attack helicopter pilot. We were both frustrated by biased coverage of women in the military and said, let's form some kind of nonprofit entity where we can start highlighting the prevalence of bias in the media.
I realize there are few sectors that can do what philanthropy does, which is look at big problems, take a long term view, try to develop strategies for addressing the root causes and then go about solving them.
In today's social business marketplace Facebook is one of the best places for nonprofits to be discovered and connect with a larger audience on the basis of shared values. So to get started, a non-profit should launch a Facebook page and invite your existing real world community to connect your cause and their networks.
In my case, I give a lot to animal welfare because I think that's pretty neglected in America.
The Silverlake Conservatory is a nonprofit music school in Los Angeles where we teach music, mostly to kids, but to people of all ages - people who are old, people with beards, all kinds of people.
My mother is chairman of a bank called the Indo-Zambia Bank. It's a joint venture between Zambia and India. My father runs Integrity Foundation, an anticorruption organization.
I launched Chefs for Humanity, a national nonprofit, with my voice, heart and money from my own pocket. Money gives you the ability to make a difference in the world and, when used in a positive way, is a lot of fun.
Volunteering knows no divides and there is equal value in sorting food at the food bank, mentoring school children, and serving on a nonprofit board.
I have a festival called Shaggy and Friends, which is a charity event to raise funds for a hospital.
I created my foundation as a result of that and my website, and I try to shed some light on some very topical issues right now. The idea is to try to get people to become obviously more knowledgeable about the issue and try to get corporations and individuals to contribute to these nonprofit organizations.
My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada's nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.
When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.
My mother has been really instrumental in raising a lot of money through the Boys & Girls Club in my hometown.
I wanted to share my love of coffee with a wider audience and also continue to raise money for The Thirst Project through Common Culture Coffee.
Showers last only 10 minutes, but you can't do anything else in there but think. The shower is probably the main place I come up with ideas. That's where I came up with the concept for OneVoice, my nonprofit organization.
I feel like what I'm best at is being a musician and a performer. I want to use that to help people who are good at starting nonprofits.
