Crowd-Sourcing Public Welfare

I have plenty of ideas, and some of them I like to think aren't so terrible.  One such idea was the concept of an entity which helps to transparently partner businesses with charities and community prgrams.  This thought occurred to me while thinking about a business called BoxLunch, which contributes based on sales, with "Every $10 you spend BoxLunch will help provide a meal to a person in need" according to the website.

I thought this was pretty cool, because while other companies offer opportunities to donate extra money with your sale or with specific purchases, this integrates the charitable idea into the business model.  This is something that is admirable to me, I like to think of it like crowd-sourcing public welfare.  And I don't mean that so much in the sense of actually funding a welfare program,but rather that as a people, we are looking out for people.

It's good and well for companies to do this, but something that can be difficult is determining whether or not the entity is actually contributing, as well as whether the charity is legitimate or not.  While I would love to see the majority of businesses trying to participate in community programs(as many do), it's something that can be easy to claim and harder to prove false.

With Kickstarter and Patreon, I think about the fact that increased accessibility and presence has helped entities with smaller presences find their smaller audiences.  This is a big part of our world today, the ability for the Internet to give a larger potential presence and allow greater outreach and connection.  Google One was an app that partnered with charities, checked said charities, and helped users give small amounts and encourage other users to give.  I mention these things, Kickstarter, Patreon, and Google One, because to me they are a demonstration of the ability of crowds, not entities, to achieve large goals.  One of the ways I believe they help do that is by the ease of being able to contribute, compared to without these systems.

This idea then, would be like crowd-sourcing charity, but from businesses.  It could possibly be as simple as the business signing up to participate and selecting a rate of participation, which would in turn earn them the status as a particpant in valid charity.  The transparency is the biggest concern I have, but I think there's a potential here.  It looks good for a business to give back to the community, and something like a simple logo or symbol can help them easily show that(imagine like a little blue + or heart they could put by their logo or something).  The task would be to help partner charities and businesses together, but to also help support that as a common practice.  How would we do that?

Our attention is one of the most valuable commodities as a crowd, and how we spend our time and money is incredibly important.  There's a (hopefully) growing movement to be more aware as consumers, and doing this is actually productive - corporations need your attention to thrive.  If an environment could be encouraged to exist in which consumers sought exclusively "giving" businesses, we could create a culture in which large sources of monetary flow helped to contribute to the well-being of the community which supports it.

I'm not going to say this is an easy thing to do, or that it would "solve" problems - rather I would like to propose the idea for conversation and direction, because I would like to understand how we can help create a culture in which the sum of money was for people, humanity.  I understand how corporations come to exist, and how competition works, but it's hard not to feel like the distribution of wealth has gotten a bit fucked.

I'd rather not argue about whose fault it is, but instead try to talk about ways we could maybe be better as people and work toward a world that's a little better, a little bit at a time.

Trot On Everypony,

Alturiigo

Edit:  Came across these tweets from a little over a year prior to posting this