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About ShoreBank Pacific ShoreBank Pacific is the first commercial bank in the United States with a commitment to environmentally sustainable community development. We believe that long-term community prosperity goes hand-in-hand with a healthy environment. With that vision, ShoreBank Pacific, a Washington State chartered, FDIC insured bank, was formed in 1997 as a joint project of ShoreBank Corp., the nation's first community development bank, and Ecotrust™, an environmental non-profit. Through our lending programs, ShoreBank Pacific brings together conservation and community and economic development. We continue to create wealth in communities that wouldn't have access to banking otherwise. We've built a fantastic place to work that is founded on honesty and excellence. We became a B Corporation to support our mission and lend our credibility to a system that identifies and supports "good businesses." When you deposit your money at ShoreBank Pacific, you are helping to create sustainable companies, vibrant communities, and healthy environments by providing funds to our lending programs. Like other banks, we provide commercial loans; however, unlike other banks, we are conscientious to whom we lend, and potential customers are "scored" using a program of sustainability criteria, including conservation, community development, and economy measures. A healthy and sustainable business will translate into a healthy and sustainable community and economy. ShoreBank Pacific is wholly owned by ShoreBank Corporation, the nation's first community development and environmental banking corporation. The Change We Seek™ ShoreBank Pacific profitably assists businesses, and through them their communities, to be sustainable in economic, social, and environmental practices. * We lend money from our EcoDeposits™ program to businesses and non-profits that are committed to improving their sustainable footprint. While many of our loan customers are environmentally rel

"Creates and shapes brands for the 21st century. Hand in hand with the world's greatest businesses, we develop strategies for global brands to do well by doing good. We are thinkers and doers, strategists and creatives, change-makers and movers. * We believe innovation is more powerful than responsibility. * We believe investment shapes the world more than charity. * We believe impact can be measured over more than one bottom line. Business is run by people and people are inherently good. We exist to let that shine. Like a Lovely Day. "

"The farm is located on 410 acres of fertile land on the Bolaven Plateau of southern Laos, bordered by mountain streams on the north and southwest. About 100 acres are devoted to grasses and legumes to restore nitrogen to the soil and provide fodder for livestock. The remainder is devoted to coffee growing. Bolaven-grown coffee beans are hand-sorted to ensure quality before they are roasted, packaged and shipped. Bolaven Farms is "a for-profit business with the mandate to act justly, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God," Say explained. He also has created a companion nonprofit organization-Just Grounds-that relates directly to churches and recruits short-term missions volunteers and prayer partners. "

"Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a nonprofit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems, and works to scale up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. Primary Objectives Innovate: Develop innovative solutions to poverty and policy problems worldwide. Use frontier knowledge from economics, psychology and public health. Evaluate: Conduct randomized controlled trials to evaluate public policies. This provides the highest quality and most reliable answers to what works and what does not. Our evaluations seek to generate insight into why particular strategies work -- not just whether they work -- so as to make the findings useful for scale-up and replication in other settings and countries. Replicate: Replicate evaluations in multiple settings. We can learn from one evaluation, but we can learn much more about what to do after seeing replications of similar interventions in multiple settings, and learn when ideas work best, and when they do not. Communicate: Communicate lessons to donors and implementers. The ultimate aim of IPA is to help resources be allocated to effective programs and policies. IPA's communication strategy targets both donors, to help guide them to programs and ideas that have been proven effective, as well as to organizations, to help guide their programming decisions towards more effective ideas and implementation strategies. We do this through non-technical communication on individual studies and sets of studies, as well as through synthesis articles and conversations that frame key policy issues and present reliable evidence to help guide development practitioners, policymakers, investors and donors towards better decisions and allocation of resources. Scale: Scale-up of effective solutions. This includes hands-on technical assistance or direct implementation if appropriate, as well as extensive communication and advoc

"About Us Virtue Ventures is a small, innovative firm committed to furthering the field of social entrepreneurship through action-research, technical services and our own initiatives. Our practitioner-focused and mission-centered approach stems from being a creative team rooted in industry: Virtue Ventures' team has first-hand experience designing, launching and managing social enterprises and nonprofit agencies. We have worked with literally hundreds of nonprofits and social enterprises, spanning sectors and industries in over 40 countries worldwide."

This is a space for your ideas. To collectively exchange, connect and collaborate for social good and to foster new thinking on groundbreaking social innovation. Change Connections is part of a wider initiative to support Nokia's potential to offer empowering solutions through new connections - between people, places, information and ideas - that improve the quality of lives, globally. We've undertaken a series of conversations and events to find out where the future of communication technology could help billions of people around the world better their lives - from organizing for collective power, to accessing health care, or learning even when getting to school is not a possibility. Along the way, it's become undeniable that this happens by building community. That's why we're connecting with you, here, now: to create a space for open ideation and change. On this site you'll find ideas from leading thinkers we've interviewed, background on some of the issues and opportunities at hand, links to our friends, and most importantly opportunities for you to connect to people, current work, new ideas and future possibilities in new and inspired ways. We've started a conversation and we're asking you to join and to help shape the potential future of communication technology for good. So jump in, and change connections.