Here’s a great chance to help an incredible organization that provides health services around the world.  Project HOPE recruits volunteer doctors, health educators, and other field professionals to provide direct medical services as well as education and preventative services to people in need all around the world.  We’ve just launched our first fundraising website at Project HOPE’s recent board meeting!  Please visit today:

http://ideliverhealth.projecthope.org/

And check out Project HOPE’s main website, done by Convio, at

http://www.projecthope.org/

We’re looking forward to working with Project HOPE and our marketing partner ICF International to help Project HOPE realize grassroots fundraising success.  They work so hard sending doctors all over the world to patients who need them, that they deserve our support.

If you’re reading this, why not head over to http://ideliverhealth.projecthope.org/ and make a generous donation to Project HOPE’s lifesaving work?  Or, select from among Project HOPE’s dozens of specific causes to create a personalized giving page that expresses your priorities!

It looks like the neighborhood association has succeeded in bullying this worthy charity to sell one of its three brownstones for market-rate housing.  They’ve allowed the Inn to convert two of the brownstones it owns to affordable housing, while forcing the charity to sell the third brownstone for market-rate housing.  This coldhearted NIMBY opposition to affordable housing will result in the permanent loss of 11 units zoned for a lodging house — a zone that existed at 38 Upton Street when each and every one of the NIMBY neighborhood bullies bought their property.  Eleven formerly homeless people won’t be able to move into permanent apartment housing and get a leg up on society, because of what happened here.  These 11 people will continue to take up shelter beds, in turn leaving another 11 homeless people out on Boston streets in the dead of winter.

In the future, if this ever happens again (especially just a block from where I live!) I’d like for Grassroots Giving Group to be able to quickly deploy a fundraising website to enable the decent majority to easily donate and tell their friends, so the decent soul of our community can stand up to a few bullies with intimidating signs in their windows.  I just hate to see bullying succeed; it sets a terrible precedent for what organized and persistent NIMBY activists can accomplish to derail charitable uses of property.  I’m sorry that we weren’t ready, as a new business, to respond quickly enough to this situation.  In the future, I’d like us to be there helping fight for decency, good citizenship, and fairness.  That’s part of why I’ve worked so hard to own this business.

Those are future plans.  For now, see the Boston Globe’s coverage of this travesty of a settlement of a frivolous lawsuit, here.