On Wednesday, February 10, at 6pm, we’re teaming up with Victoria’s Diner in Boston to host a neighborhood awareness raiser for Project HOPE.  Please come join us!  Enjoy some free appetizers and learn about Project HOPE’s lifesaving work in Haiti.  Brian MacQuarrie, who reported the Boston Globe piece on Saturday on Massachusetts doctors aboard the traveling hospital ship the USNS Comfort.  There is no door charge or particular fundraising request, but there will be an opportunity to donate.  If you wish, we’ll help you create your own fundraising webpage to help save lives.

• We’ll be at Victoria’s, 1024 Mass Ave, Boston, Wednesday night at 6pm.
• RSVP to info@grassrootsgivinggroup.com for free car shuttle service to and from the Andrew T stop on the Red Line!
• Download a printable PDF flyer here.
• See you there!

Project HOPE needs your help today! Click here to read more about their work in the field.

Our fundraising website client, Project HOPE, is on the ground in Haiti right now.  In partnership with the U.S. Navy, they’ve sailed the hospital ship the USNS Comfort to anchor just outside Port-au-Prince, where volunteer doctors are working a grueling schedule to care for patients and save lives.

I’m asking friends to visit my Project HOPE page and make a thoughtfully generous donation, so Project HOPE will have more money to spend flying volunteer doctors and crucial medical supplies to immediate use in Haiti.  We should also remember that even as Haiti rebuilds, other people around the world also need Project HOPE desperately too.  Project HOPE is still helping care for people after the Asian tsunami several years ago!

Or better yet, visit our main fundraising website to create your own Project HOPE fundraising page!

Thank you for your support.  Funds go directly to Project HOPE, immediately, and I can assure you they will be spent right away on delivering health to innocent, suffering people who are in desperate need.  These patients need you!

We’re listed as a “startup you should follow” in this week’s edition of MassHighTech!  See the article here.

This was a nice surprise.  I only found out we were listed when someone contacted me for comment on it.  Thank you to MassHighTech for the privilege of being recognized among the innovative and worthy companies that are listed in their Startup Report.

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.

We’ve completed launching our first fundraising website, for Project HOPE!  Right now it’s just launched to the client; we’re still working on coordinating the web design with a larger redesign of their whole website.  Stay tuned — but this is exciting!

I live in Boston’s South End, a nice neighborhood with mostly nice people.  Dogs wag their tails on the red-brick sidewalks outside coffeeshops nestled among the picturesque Victorian red-brick brownstones.  Our neighborhood was built to look like London in the 1850s in an attempt to attract the business-owning class to stay in Boston — and 150 years later it’s weathered business cycles and weather, to be the picturesque neighborhood it is today.

Speaking of weather, the winters are awfully harsh here in Boston, so it’s a good thing there are charitable organizations like the Pine Street Inn to help end homelessness in Boston.  Homelessness is a human tragedy that represents a failure of our collective responsibility as a society.  The Pine Street Inn is not far from us, and right on Upton Street, the block next to mine, they own three brownstones at 38-42 Upton Street, which they plan to convert into long-term affordable apartments for formerly homeless clients who are ready for a stable living environment.  The Pine Street Inn has several other affordable-housing buildings in our neighborhood, right alongside the fancy condos and “regular” apartments, with no significant impact on crime or quality of life at all.  These folks blend right in and have done for decades.

Sadly, some of our neighbors don’t feel our neighborhood is for everyone.  See the recent TV coverage at http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/19705850/detail.html — our neighborhood association has been taken over by people who oppose affordable housing for the poor, simply on the grounds that they don’t want poor folks living on their street.  This is terrible.  Several of our decent neighbors signed a majority petition supporting the Pine Street Inn, but still these neighbors fight the poor, with intimidating signs in their windows and spreading falsehoods on TV.  See my blog at http://www.CompassionateNeighbors.org/ for more information.

I’d really like for a company like GGG to be able to help issues like this by giving the vast majority of decent people an easy way to donate to an organization like the Pine Street Inn — say, for legal defense against frivolous lawsuits, or just to support their programs.  When rich neighbors intimidate a charity with their copious free time and funds for lawyers, there has to be a grassroots way to respond.  I’m frustrated, frankly, that my company doesn’t yet have the ability to quickly raise funds for news-cycle-responsive causes like this.  We’re still a very new company, and we will develop that ability.

For now, check out CompassionateNeighbors.org and stay tuned to this evolving issue.

We’re very excited to announce we’ve signed a contract with Project HOPE, the respected global-health organization, to create a grassroots fundraising website for them!  Our website will figure prominently in their upcoming new web design and fundraising strategy.  We’re very excited, too, to be teaming up with the professionals at ICF International to “fuel the fire” and market this cutting-edge grassroots fundraising website!  We should be launched by late July after working with Project HOPE on an initial web design and setup activities.  GGG could not ask for a better launch client in Project HOPE or partner in ICF.  We are totally committed to Project HOPE’s grassroots fundraising success, and we’re proud to be part of their lifesaving work all around the world.  Stay tuned for more!

Eternal God, accept our daily labor!
We offer it most humbly to Your throne,
As joined with friend and co-worker and neighbor
We build the world that You began alone.

If in Your service we should find our fortune,
Hold us close, so we remember You,
And help us use our wisdom to apportion
To justice all that by Your law is due.

And if to serve You we must work through hardship,
Help us love our seeds enough to grow,
And help us see that underneath Your guardship
Our work bears fruit in more ways than we know.

Help us on our quest to take the day
That come tomorrow, we still come to pray.

In March 2009, just as our company was starting, MIT’s Science and Engineering Business Club invited Jeremy to speak about GGG’s business plan as part of a four-speaker alumni panel.  It was a time to share with current students what it’s like to run a business.  Jeremy presented GGG as an example of a business that’s adopted a bootstrapping strategy, as opposed to seeking venture funding; he talked about the basic elements of a business plan and shared how GGG has thought through them.  Watch a QuickTime video of the PowerPoint presentation here (it’s 11MB).