pcdonohue

Sustainable brands have the opportunity to take advantage of this new level of connectivity with producers and consumers to do what their profit-only competitors cannot: build passionate, engaged customers around real stories of impact. My team at the Hoop and I just had great piece published by Sustainable Life Media where we discuss how crowdsourcing is the key to unlocking massive customer engagement opportunities that only sustainable brands can master. Millions of people across the... Read Full Story

We had a great summer in terms of press coverage at the Hoop Fund, with stories in the Wall Street Journal , Forbes , Reuters , Triple Pundit , and Fair Trade USA. Below are couple of excerpts from Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Forbes - Greed has gone good By Elimra Bayrasli Patrick Donohue, Co-Founder & CEO of the Hoop Fund, an e-Bay meets Kiva crowd funding platform that allows individuals to purchase “ethically” products and to invest in the farmers and artisans behind them... Read Full Story

I've never done a micro-loan or groupon, but just did @JoinTheHoop. A nice shirt or present for my wife + microloan + savings. Brilliant. - Dan Ancona I'm really excited to announce our latest offering from the Hoop: crowd-funding "deals" for sustainable & fair trade products & producers. Check out the press release below for more, and please forward it on. SF Based Hoop Fund unveils new crowd-funding Deals campaign combining fair-trade and personal investment The “Fund Your Sweater... Read Full Story

What happens when you put 16 up & coming social entrepreneurs together for 12 weeks to work out which 3 should split a $225,000 pot? A whole lot of collaboration and stronger social enterprises. Hub Ventures is a 12-week evening program in the SF Bay Area that provides funding and mentorship to a community of 16 entrepreneurs building solutions for a better world. My company, the Hoop Fund , was one of the 16 ventures accepted to the program, which is being built as a kind of Y-Combinator... Read Full Story

When we started working together on the Hoop Fund back in March we knew we wanted to use SOCAP as a launching point. The Social Capital conference , in its third year, is a pioneering conference that brings together investors, entrepreneurs, advocates and more at the intersection of money and meaning. And of course since the Hoop is about everyday people becoming social capitalists and creating personal meaning in what they buy, we were pretty sure that SOCAP10 would be a great fit for us... Read Full Story

We had a phenomenal launch event for the Hoop Fund here in San Francisco this month, with more than a hundred of our close friends and colleagues coming together for the unveiling our website and to see what we're doing with two of our founding partners: Indigenous Designs and Alter Eco. With Alter Eco chocolate, quinoa, and rice for people to enjoy, and designer apparel from Indigenous Design to try on, we presented five loan projects for the communities behind all the fantastic products... Read Full Story

View Larger Map If you're in San Francisco this week, please join my colleagues and me for our friends & family unveiling of The Hoop Fund! It will be a really fun evening of tasty treats and an opportunity to engage a great start-up project working to connect you to the makers of products you'll love, while also helping us get our first batch of projects started with our partners, Alter Eco and Indigenous Designs ! Please RSVP All the best, Patrick When: Thursday, August 12, 6... Read Full Story

Part 3 of a three part series on how to use homestays to jump-start a community-based entrepreneurial initiative. Also check out Part 1 and Part 2 . A window into the community May 6th, 2006, the third day of my homestay in the Sri Lanka colony of the Indiramma Nagar slum cluster, next to the airport in Hyderabad, India. The mercury was pushing 46 degrees Celsius. No hint of the coming monsoon. "Soja," my host Sultana ordered me. I didn't argue, the combination of the Indian summer and... Read Full Story

In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time. – Bill McKibben, “Deep Economy" Fittingly enough, I picked up Deep Economy at a community book sale for a local library in Ithaca, NY. The book sale had an impressive selection and a "chat with your neighbor" kind of energy, and it wasn't long before I ended up in... Read Full Story

Part 2 of a three part series on how to use homestays to jump-start a community-based entrepreneurial initiative. You can read Part 1 here . An alleyway in Indiramma Nagar "Can I talk to you about something?" Muneer asked me during one of our afternoon walks around the city. It's May of 2006, the fifth week our BoP initiative with the Solae Company , and I was in the middle of a weeklong homestay in Indiramma Nagar - a cluster of slums by the Hyderabad airport. Muneer was a young Muslim... Read Full Story