User talk:Directsponsor

Peer-to-Peer Charity! Direct Sponsor is peer-to-peer charity. When finished, it will be made open source for others to use as they wish. For now it is being rolled out to enable people to set up permaculture projects. Our pilot project is in Rusinga Island, Kenya, where a group of twelve recipients are collaborating on converting their land.

The system consists of an introductory site (directsponsor.org )where new users can get a description of the system itself, a blog site (directsponsor.net) where recipients post regular text and video updates of their progress, a forum and an accounts site, with custon-designed accounting tools to enable anyone to see the full accounts online at any time.

Sponsors and recipients are directly in contact with each other and sponsorships go directly from sponsor to recipient with no organization in between. The organizational aspects are replaced by peer-to-peer equivalents. Recipients form groups of not more than 12 and together pay for any skills, goods or services they need. Each group has a coordinator to help them fulfill obligations to sponsors and a teacher for the permaculture project. These people also have blogs in the blog site where they record the progress of the group as a whole.

Each sponsored individual or family owns their own project and collaborates freely and voluntarily with the other recipients in a true peer relationship. There's no collective. Anyone brought in to help is an employee of the recipients, and is not in a position of authority. This is simply because the money goes directly from sponsor to recipient, thus the power relationship is reversed.