VNN recently caught up with Darian Rodriguez Heyman; the Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the creators of the internationally popular social media community Craigslist.org.

The foundation was started in 2000 to be a resource for nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit professionals and those seeking to connect with causes with the purpose of giving back; today this operating foundation has a $2 million budget and an ambitious plan for a Web 2.0 platform which will act as a resources clearinghouse for the social sector.

Working on the principle originally espoused by Bill Clinton of ‘Seek first to collaborate and then lead’, Darian has almost single-handedly assembled more than 150 partner organizations for what will be a Yellow Pages for the social sector and he is just about to head into Beta phase.

Just as Craigslist.org‘s social media communities interact on a range of local needs such as jobs, housing and dating; the new platform will be an invaluable resource, particularly for people in the ‘engaged philanthropy’ movement. Retiring baby-boomers, Gen-Xers and the Millennial generation are no longer satisfied with just giving volunteer time and/or their treasure; they have a powerful psychological need to apply their talent and experience to the causes about which they feel passionate.

Nonprofits that focus solely on fund raising without taking these needs into account by engaging donors in their work will certainly suffer in these tough economic times.

Good examples of engaged philanthropy organizations are the Full Circle Fund that is cultivating the next generation of community leaders and driving lasting social change in the Bay Area—where Darian serves as President of the Community Fellows class—and the Root Cause Institute’s Social Innovation Forum serving the greater Boston area.

To date, the foundation’s activities have mainly centered around their Nonprofit Boot Camps, which this year will be held in New York - 8/16/08 and the SF Bay Area - 10/18/08. These camps are extended online as the Craigslist Foundation’s learning experience delivered through podcasts, PPTs and other course materials. Click here for more.

I asked Darian about the emphasis on nonprofit as opposed to those engaged in for-profit social enterprises and local government agency initiatives. People from other sectors are welcome to sign up for the boot camps based upon the Craigslist operating principle of equal accessibility; the only restriction is a limit on participation to four people per organization.

And how do they measure success?

The original metric was the number of people attending the boot camps. However, a recent grant from the Haas Sr. Fund will now enable them to measure their ongoing effectiveness a year or more after each boot camp.

All along the foundation has asked participants if they would recommend a boot camp to friends and fellow workers. Here Darian was proud to say that this approval rating has never fallen below 96%.

The new Web 2.0 platform will present challenges as the foundation will need to come to terms with being hyper-local and global at the same time.

For example, their Tools for Nonprofit links to Idealist.org a great directory of web sites for individuals starting, managing and funding nonprofits, which is already global in scope.

Whereas the section on Nonprofit Capacity Resources: is a directory of nonprofit capacity links by category with a facility for user ratings and comments –Links to Capaciteria.org — whose tag line is “Serving up Peer-Rated Nonprofit Resources 24/7”— and is largely US focused.

With a mission to transform community some resources will necessarily need to remain local. Imagine local urban hubs offering Support Services and In-Kind donation wish lists which right now only exist around the foundation’s home base in the California’s Bay area:

Bay Area Nonprofit Support Resources: The Nonprofit Support Yellow Pages is a comprehensive directory of nonprofit management support organizations and vendors serving nonprofits throughout the Bay Area. Click here for more

In Kind Donations for Bay Area Nonprofits: iReuse.com enables nonprofits to create free wish lists and automatically get matched up with local businesses and residents who are donating items that meet their needs. Click here for more

This is a daunting task that Darian concedes will require a certain amount of ‘seeding’ as they roll-out to other major metropolitan markets. The know-how certainly resides at Craigslist.org as originally conceived and executed by Craig Newmark and his team.

Collaboration is at the core of Darian’s work and perhaps he will be working with a similar but quite different initiative launched last year, namely Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute’s WiserEarth online; described as ‘an international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world, the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice and the environment.’ WiserEarth provides tools to help organizations and individuals find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances. Its comprehensive taxonomy (described on the site as Areas of Focus) combined with its database of over 100,000 organizations based in 243 countries, territories and sovereign islands, makes it the largest, freely accessible, international directory of non-governmental organizations.

Working together or separately; the great advantage Darian has at his disposal is the secret sauce behind Craigslist.org that has made it the bane of the newspaper industry. This gives him the ability to scale ‘better, cheaper, faster’ as the Silicon Valley VC’s like to say.

Add to this Darian’s vision, energy and extended network, and we could well see his new Web 2.0 platform become the new ‘voice’ for the social sector and the growing number of community-minded engaged philanthropists.

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