Thursday afternoon in Savannah, Ga., the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development will unveil a pilot program meant to address poor maintenance conditions at public housing developments across the nation. HUD’s idea?  Let outside investors fix them up.

The problem: Like tens of thousands of other subsidized developments, Tobie Grant Manor falls under Section 9 of the federal housing act. Any money to fix it up has to come from the government, and HUD says it’s about $26 billion short.

That’s why HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan says shifting properties like Tobie Grant Manor from Section 9 to Section 8 gives more options.  

BlueKite, a Miami-based platform for cross-border bill payments, is today announcing $1.5 million in new funding, led by PeopleFund, which contributed $1.3 million of the total raise.

The process for receiving approval is not simple, so Florida has served as a battleground for dealing with the regulatory and legal issues surrounding the set up of these cross-border payments. In Florida, the service has only be up-and-running for three weeks so far, but has already processed around 1,000 payments, averaging around $18.00 each, or around $20,000 in total transactions.

But for now, the company is targeting mom-and-pop shop cash stores, including Save Mart, Cash First (Naples) Agente, Atlantida, TipTopCashing, and others in Tampa and Miami.

That big issue caused Mr. Caldbeck to leave his job to start CircleUp, a company that aims to connect up-and-coming consumer products companies with investors.

crowdfunding is a way for capital-starved entrepreneurs to receive financing that neither big investors nor lenders are willing or able to provide. To others, it represents a potential minefield that could help bad businesses get off the ground before they eventually fail, and in some cases could even ensnare unsophisticated investors in outright fraud.

SoMoLend, which lends money to small, Main Street-type businesses that typically wouldn’t interest private investors.

Another strong example of the commitment phase of employee engagement is being demonstrated in Cleveland, Ohio, through a community-wide economic development initiative called Sustainable Cleveland 2019 (SC2019).The SC2019 initiative focuses on the strengths of the region and levera

“Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few.” And a lot more will change, very quickly.

In Europe, equity-based crowdfunding allows people buy an ownership stake in your business. That practice is illegal in the U.S., but will likely gain steam in a global marketplace where individuals can use platforms like Symbid to help propel an interesting new business into the marketplace. Social lending sites like LendingClub or Prosper permit you to legally crowdfund your for-profit startup in the U.S., but you’ll have to start paying it back immediately, and you could be left liable for the loan if the business fails.

Crowdsourcing will only grow, and it’s up to you to weigh the risks and benefits of using it to extend your enterprise. It may serve a single, specific purpose, or support a key component of your operating blueprint across your organization, or it may not be the right choice--at least not yet.

So my first-hand experience with trying to build a greener home and office space is this: We’re relying way too much on the end consumer to move the market forward.

’m not saying you should stop marketing to the end consumer -- we must normalize green building for them so they can comfortably adopt it. But we can’t rely on the consumer to push the architect, builder, appraiser and banker to get a green or more-efficient home or building built. It’s just too hard. And at the end of the day, our ongoing research has proven time and again that consumers will choose the more convenient, comfortable option. They simply don’t want to do battle with the construction industry to get a greener home.

So if you’re responsible for marketing an energy efficient or green building product, take a chunk of your marketing dollars and spend them on an out of the box campaign to show everyone in the value chain what’s in it for them. When we stop relying on consumers to tilt at windmills, we’ll quickly make green building the new normal.

This incredibly strong “it’s not my fault” mentality creates a huge challenge for energy conservation behavior change.  According to social scientist J.B. Rotter, perceived locus of control strongly influences whether behaviors are thought to be “instrumental for goal attainment.”

An applicable psychological concept for this situation is called learned helplessness, which develops when people take actions to address a problem that ultimately fail, thereby solidifying the conclusion that they have no control.

Learned helplessness often translates into a serious motivation problem. Those who have failed at previous tasks are more apt to conclude that they can’t succeed in the future. According to pioneering researchers Steven Maier and Martin Seligman, “Exposure to uncontrollable events interferes with our ability to perceive contingent relationships between our behavior and outcomes.” 

“’Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.”