 Welcome to Kickstarter, Uber, Airbnb, oh my, what the sharing economy means for social good. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm a webinar program manager here at TechSoup. I'll be your host for today's event. I've been with TechSoup for 6 years and previously had worked for 3 small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and in Oakland, California where I was accidental techie trying to solve tech problems and decide which new types of technology to embark upon for our small offices. You'll also see assisting in the chat, Ali Bazdikian who is an Interactive Events and Video Producer at TechSoup. She'll be here to help you with any of your tech issues or to help flag your questions for our presenters. So feel free to put them in anytime throughout the duration of the webinar. Now on to the geniuses of today's event. We're thrilled to have with us our presenters, the first of which is Jeremiah Aoyang who is the Chief Catalyst and Founder of Crowd Companies. He focuses on how large companies tap the collaborative economy and maker movements. Prior to that he was a founding partner at Altimeter Group and an industry analyst at Forrester Research. And he really is a top dog as we should say when it comes to the sharing economy and collaborative economy and really surveying the overall landscape of how this new economic model is growing and developing. We'll also be joined by Janelle Orsi who is the Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center where they facilitate the growth of more sustainable and localized economies. And so she works in a variety of capacities both being a sharing economy lawyer in private practice but also specializing in helping communities with shared housing, cars, form cooperatives, launching urban farming initiatives and forming social enterprises. So we're really fortunate to have her joining us as well. Lastly, our third speaker of the day will be Jose Kinyones who is the CEO and Founding Executive Director of the Mission Asset Fund. He's a former legislative assistant for Congressman Ruben Hinojosa. And he has a background in federal policy on financial protections, immigration, welfare reform, and he's a lifelong advocate for social justice. And his organization, Mission Asset Fund, runs and operates local lending circles. And so he's helped institutionalize and formalize a traditional system of shared economy in lending and helping to establish some great standards for people to improve their financial situation and status through community lending. So he'll be talking to us as something of a case study today. So a look at our agenda. I'll do a quick introduction to TechSoup in case you're not familiar with who we are. We'll do a couple of poll questions just to make sure we're all on the same page and to gauge how you, our audience, may already be engaged in the sharing economy. Then Jeremiah will take us through his view of what the sharing economy and collaborative economy, what they are, what it is, and he'll show us a broad view of what that economy looks like. Then Janelle will take us through what sharing looks like for a just and resilient world, looking at how nonprofits, libraries, and individual community members can embrace this type of new model for the social good. And then we'll hear from Jose about the Mission Asset Fund as an example of how this kind of sharing community can be something that forms a real nonprofit organization and can be done in a really unique way to serve the community and to give back. So quickly getting started with who is TechSoup? We're a 501c3 nonprofit working toward the day when every organization, nonprofit library foundation on the planet has the access and resources of technology to better meet their mission. We have been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. We do that in a variety of ways from offering consulting services and acting as a liaison between companies like Microsoft and Adobe who provide their donations through TechSoup's platform. So you can get programs like Windows 8 and QuickBooks 2014 by visiting TechSoup.org. So if you are a nonprofit or a library listener, feel free to come there to find out more about our programs and how they can help you. Now on to our poll questions. So take just a moment and answer to the best of your ability on this screen. Are you currently a participant in the sharing or collaborative economy? And go ahead and just click yes, no, I'm not sure. And don't worry if you're not sure because we'll have a lot of opportunities during the course of this webinar to help answer that question so you feel more confident in knowing it. So I'll give just a moment for everyone to be able to participate. Just click those buttons on your screen and I'll go ahead and show the results in just a moment here. So it looks like about 32% are saying yes they are participating in some way in the sharing or collaborative economy. 18% says no. And about half of our audience is saying they're not sure. And that's really helpful for our presenters to have an idea of sort of where you view yourselves. We have one person asking how many participants are on the call right now. And at the moment we have 77 but we're still early in the webinar so I imagine we'll have more people joining shortly. So here's a big question and you can select as many on the screen as you want. Go ahead and check any that you've done. So I've used a bike share or car share like Zipcar. I've used co-op stores or gone to farmers markets. I've chipped in with GoFundMe or Kickstarter, Indiegogo. I've done a babysitting co-op or participated in mom-to-mom swaps where you're trading baby gear or diaper co-ops. Maybe you've used Airbnb or Home Exchange or maybe you've just casually couch surfed. Have you used a site like DonorsChoose or Kiva or Adopt a Classroom? Have you purchased using Bitcoin or some other kind of online currency even something like in Second Life? Have you co-worked or used shared office equipment? Do you use Lyft, Uber, or Sidecar? Or maybe you've joined a potluck or meal-sharing meetup group. Click on any that apply to you. And this is certainly not an extensive all-inclusive list. We know that libraries are some of the original sharing models that we have seen in our economy with having things like lending not just books and DVDs and CDs, but also lending tools and things like that. So I didn't have room to include all of them. But I'll go ahead and show. So it looks like the great majority of people have gone and used co-ops or farmers markets. A lot of people have participated with having shared office space or equipment or co-working environments. Many people have chipped in with a GoFundMe or Kickstarter campaign. And whether or not you've run them, many of us have participated in these models. So this is just an example of the breadth of ways that the sharing economy exists. And so with that, it's a great segue into having our first presenter, Jeremiah Oying, join us on the phone to tell us a little bit more about what makes the sharing economy, what is the collaborative economy. So Jeremiah, we're so glad to have you join us today. Welcome to the call. Thank you. This is great. And I love to see those results on what people are doing. And a lot of these things sharing or collaborating with others, this is something old. We've done this for millennia. In fact, some of the first libraries were found to be in 2600 BC. This isn't new at all. But we're seeing a resurgence of this happening, mainly due to technologies like mobile and social, and there's sensors on devices called the Internet of Things and mobile payments. It's getting easier to share and to do the things that libraries are great at doing. So I'm here to take everybody on a quick tour of the sharing or collaborative economy. We can discuss the terms and why people use that. I use the term collaborative economy because it encompasses things like people making their own goods or crowdfunding. People are collaborating together as like a collective to get common goals done. Now to best illustrate this collaborative economy, I was thinking about what could be a great metaphor for a very efficient and resilient structure. And it's interesting some of the other speakers coming up happen to use the term resilient. We didn't plan this. Now honeycombs are very important. And I'm sure you're following the news on the risk in nature if we don't take care of bees and what they do to the planet. But they have refined and perfected an incredible colony of a collaborative economy of how they work together as one common group. And honeycombs, the structure that they build are very efficient. There's no wasted space between each of these hexagons. If you use circles, there would be spaces. Now if you use squares, it wouldn't be as strong to take the weight. So honeycombs are a great metaphor for the collaborative economy. And voila, here's our collaborative economy honeycomb today. And I'm going to use this diagram and come back to it multiple times so we can actually understand this space from a visual perspective. So we're using that same image. Now to create this graphic, I didn't do it alone. I worked with amazing people like Neil Gornflow from Cherubo, Lisa Ganski, Shervin, and a couple investors, Brian Solis, Alexandra, and some other folks to get their input on what is encompassing this collaborative economy. And inside of it are the people that matter the most. It is the people. And we want to call these empowered people. These are the people using these services. And many of you were checking those often on the usage adoption. And these are people you might know them as, they might be denoted as makers, or co-creators, or crowd funders, or peers, or even customers, people that are doing things with you. And what we found is that there are six distinct categories or industries today that really encompass what's happening in the collaborative economy. And if you ask me a question during the Q&A, I'll tell you about the three new ones that I'm going to add. So today we're just going to talk about these six, goods, food, services, transportation, space, and money. And what we're seeing in this collaborative economy is that people are sharing peer to peer and getting each of these six types of things from each other, often using technology. So let's take a look. We'll do each of those six, and I'm going to show you examples of what people are doing, and talk about how your organization can benefit from it. So let's take a look at goods. And you can have these slides later, and this graphic is public. People are getting custom goods, or they're sharing goods that they already have. You're probably familiar with eBay. In fact, I think the adoption rate of normal people in America is over 40% of people have used eBay in the last year. It's very, very high where you can share used goods. And we're seeing organizations like Patagonia encourage people to share their own used clothing in the Common Threads partnership. We're also seeing the rise of new startups that enable this at a more local level, like Yirtle, a San Francisco startup started by some friends of mine and others here. Whereas a mobile app, you can take pictures of your idle resources in your own office or home and swap and barter and share them with other people in your physical area, reducing the need to buy things. So imagine for your nonprofit you need a new desk or a bookcase, check out Yirtle first to see if there's something that you can get from your local area without spending any money, and then of course, you don't need any more with other folks in the TechSoup community. All right, let's look at the next one, food. That seems kind of interesting. What is happening in this space? Well, we're seeing the shared food happening. We're also seeing people sharing the preparation for food, new services are emerging. To be very simple, let's just focus on one of them, shared food. Have you heard of the website called Feastly? The URL is eatfeastly.com. And Feastly takes that concept of a restaurant but brings it into the local home, just like you might have heard of Airbnb turning homes into actual hotels. Now we're seeing that actual restaurants are now starting to happen in people's kitchens. And it means you can go to somebody's home for a home cooked authentic Brazilian meal from somebody from Brazil and meet new friends and engage in new conversation. It's a very social, local, and often using sustainable localized materials to make these meals. It's a meaningful experience. So food is being shared. Let's take a look at the next one, services here. And I think there's a lot of opportunity. There's personal services and business services. Many of the organizations that are around TechSoup can benefit from this or even offer these services. The most obvious one are the courier services like Instacart. And there's a number of startups out there that offer these types of things and they can go shopping for you or do things. My kid sister is an Instacart delivery person. And when she happens to be going to the store to go grocery shopping anyways, she opens the app and see is there something that she can buy on behalf of somebody else and deliver it into her region? So she's being efficient with her time and making money running errands at the same time. We're also seeing business services. So ODesk and you can tap in a workforce anytime you want of copy editors or researchers or marketers. And we're seeing vertical specific ones emerge. So CloudPeeps is just community managers on demand. And we're seeing it for PR called AirPR. We're seeing marketplaces of workers ready to work with you and your organization and you only hire them for what you need. So that's the services one. Now let's take a look at transportation. You might have seen these cars driving around your town. The mustaches represent peer to peer ride or as a service. And this is transportation using startups like Lyft. And we're seeing other companies offer this as well. I saw a lot of check marks. People said that they've used zip car in that last check mark or other types of ride or car sharing. Peugeot is actually changing their business model to turning it into a membership model and renting their own cars instead of trying to just sell them. This is a major change in the way that even big business is adopting to this space. They realize they have to be efficient and they want to have a high utilization of cars and reduce waste and as well generate more revenues for them. That's where I spent a lot of my time looking at those types of models. Now let's take a look at space. I saw a lot of folks that do co-working that checked that off and we're also seeing personal space being shared. It's kind of hard to avoid hearing about Airbnb. They offer unique properties anywhere in the world. But have you thought about how you could even tap on the business side for your work? Seats to Meet is a Dutch based startup that's trying to find places for you to co-work with people with similar interests to encourage serendipity so you can connect to others. So we're seeing personal space and homes as well as business being shared. Okay, let's round it out. This is the last segment here, the Collaborative Economy Honeycomb. It also has money. That's right. People are doing a couple of things in here. One of them is that they are sharing money. It's called peer-to-peer lending. So Kiva is an example of that. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Also there's crowdfunding. People are investing in projects and hoping to gain a perk or maybe even equity. The third one, which is absolutely tied to this movement, this Collaborative Economy, is people are creating their own currencies and that's the cryptocurrency space like Bitcoin. Let's take a look at some examples. Kickstarter, what a great way to get a bunch of people engaged and become advocates for your new project and fund your new project. To me, this is a wonderful example of how powerful the crowd is. They funded this digital watch, The Pebble, and they took it to market before Apple did. This is quite amazing. The crowd beat Apple to market on a smart watch. There's something to be said about the power of the people. And I took these stats here this morning and it just blew me away. I look at it every few weeks. But Lending Club, which is peer-to-peer lending instead of going to a traditional financial institution and it's at different rates. It's kind of like an online credit union really. And they've done $5 billion worth of total loans since 2008, which was the trough of the recession. So more crowd-based services. So bringing it all together at the very top, you can see that there's crowdfunding and bespoke goods, which are these custom goods. And that denotes the maker movement as part of this collaborative economy. So to close things off, I am a traditional researcher, industry analyst by background and training. And I conducted this research with my partner, Vision Critical out of Vancouver. And we have data. And I want to take five of those six categories. We don't have food on here. But here's the adoption rates in 2013, which is the dark bars. You can see the various services here. And there's a full report you can download and I'll tweet that out in a bit. And then the light colored bars show the adoption rates that are going to happen this year in the next 12 months. So to summarize, used goods like eBay is already dominant behavior and it's going to grow to the end of this year around 46% adoption by regular people in U.S., Canada, and U.K. And across these new services in the Honeycomb that I just went through, the average adoption rate is around 5-7% last year. This year by the end of 2014, it's going to double. The average adoption rates will be around 12-15%. So these are great services for you and your organization to tap. Thank you. I'm Jeremiah. I'll pass it back over to the next folks. Thank you for that, Jeremiah. Really, really interesting stuff. And before we move on to our next speaker, I want to bring this poll up that we had a little bit earlier and just let you have another chance. So for those of you that said I'm not sure or that you weren't participating in the collaborative or sharing economy, go ahead and take the poll now and let's see if there's any difference between when we first started. Because I have a feeling more people may be participating than they even realized when we look at just the breadth and scope of it with your helpful introduction to what it is. And I love the Honeycomb. A lot of yeses now. And look at there's hardly any I'm not sure. So it looks like we have a little bit of clarity here. That's great. So with that success, I'm going to go ahead and invite our next speaker onto the line so that we can go ahead and learn about how to take some of these models that you might be seeing, these huge venture capital companies using successfully, and how we can also use those and leverage those and lead in the sharing economy for the social good. So how nonprofits and libraries and free agents who are working on social good causes can really bring this back to their communities. And to do that, I'd like to invite Janelle Orsie from the Sustainable Economies Law Center to join us online now. Thank you Becky, and hello everybody, and thanks for having me. So I came to the world of the sharing economy via the route of doing social justice work. And sharing came to me as just a really incredibly powerful tool for solving a lot of the problems that we have in our society. And the sharing economy or whatever you want to call this phenomenon, I really do think it's part of a broader social transformation where people are just turning to one another much more to meet their needs rather than turning to big companies. And yeah, so I think it's going to be a really beautiful future. And the sharing economy for me encompasses many activities like the ones that I have listed on the slide. And one of the ways that I sometimes explain in the sharing economy is breaking it down into four different levels. And the levels kind of represent ways in which each of us can be involved in sharing in our lives. And so at the first level people are sharing in ways that are casual or spontaneous, or maybe just sharing things on a one-time basis, like borrowing something from a neighbor, maybe doing some couch surfing, just doing favors for people, receiving favors. And this first level is something that even right now we don't do enough of this. I think people have been enculturated with this idea that we are successful if we're able to do everything ourselves, if we sell our homes with everything we'll ever need. And it's hard to ask for favors in this society. And I think one of the steps toward a sharing economy is just the culture of being there for each other more and providing for each other more. But the casual and spontaneous types of activities aren't going to meet our longer-term needs. And that's where the second level comes in. That's where we begin to make more agreements with people because agreements become something we rely on. So maybe agreeing with a neighbor that you're going to regularly share a vacuum cleaner, or agreeing with a friend that you're going to do a childcare exchange, or sharing an office, sharing ownership of a car, this helps us meet our needs in new ways. And the agreements and relationships we form enable us to rely on these new ways. At the third level, we create organizations. And the great thing about organizations is that when one person comes and goes from them, generally the organization remains. And in that respect, organizations that facilitate sharing become institutions in our communities. And that could be a food cooperative, a tool lending library, a community land trust. And our hope for the future is that every single community will be filled with these types of activities so that any person can move into a new town and look around and just get immediately plugged into a lot of the sharing economy organizations that are already there. And then at the fourth level, and this is more of a sort of a foundational base on which we can build a sharing economy, I guess you could call them universal systems of provision, things like healthcare, social security, public education, and just broader programs that are really designed to provide for everyone and that give us a basic sense of economic security so that we can get out there and develop other kinds of structures in society to meet our needs. And so since I'm speaking to a bunch of nonprofits, really nonprofits have a role to play in fostering sharing at all four of these different levels. And I'll say more about that. The great thing about it is that that old concept of the American dream where you're going to grow up and earn money and have a house and fill the house with everything you'll ever need and have 2.3 cars per household, it's just not that achievable anymore. And we won't actually need to do that in order to feel secure about the future if we create this new American dream, one where we share with people on casual or one-time day sees where we're part of many agreements where we share things, we're part of organizations through which we share things, and we have a base of resources that our society is providing us. And if we can create this society, we can kind of give up on that idea that we have to accumulate everything and own it ourselves because the sad thing is this is where we're at as far as how wealth is distributed in the United States which is that 20% of people control 93% of the wealth which means the other 80% really is only working with 7% of the wealth and the assets. And the people who are struggling and working really hard and trying to achieve that old-fashioned American dream, they're just not going to be able to do it. We haven't made it possible to do that. And it was really the old American dream that desire to accumulate and the old models of working and consuming, that is in many ways what destroyed the American dream. And so I think though that the sharing economy can reverse this trend, this immense wealth gap because a lot of these activities listed here generate wealth for the 80%. It recirculates the wealth through that group of people. And so when wealth recirculates, wealth grows. So I have a lot of hope for society because of that. And also sharing in general just has so much potential to also reduce our impact on the planet, to also build community and make people happier, to save time and lighten our loads. So it's just a very powerful thing. So if you're a nonprofit organization and you're thinking about how to work toward creating a sharing world, one thing to stick on your to-do list is to create the platforms for sharing. And platform sounds like a very techie term, but when I use that word, it could mean many things. It could mean organizing events through which people can connect with one another and share. It could mean creating physical places where people come together to share. And libraries of course are a perfect example of that. And sort of building on the concept of libraries, we can do so much more like tool-ending libraries is a really perfect example of how that has expanded. I'm speaking today from a co-working space which is a large shared workspace in Oakland, California. And I've lived in shared housing and creating these shared spaces within our community also creates fertile ground for all kinds of other sharing. And the platform could also be a network or organization that connects people for the purpose of sharing, so it's not an event or a place, but just a network through which people exchange and provide for one another. And the technology is a big piece of it because so much is now possible in the sharing economy because of technology, because of the tools we have to manage things that we share, because of the ability to communicate with one another, to schedule things, and share with people we've never met before. And there's still so much room to build on this technology. But a major question that's coming up, and I'm sure that many of the listeners have seen articles that are very critical of the sharing economy in its manifestation as Airbnb and Lyft and Uber, and large companies that are creating platforms through which people can share and exchange with one another. These are companies that are now getting valuations of billions of dollars. And a lot of people are kind of having a little gut instinct that it doesn't feel right that if we're creating a sharing economy that the platforms are owned and controlled and enriching the very, very wealthy members of society. And so this is where I urge people to start thinking like commoners. And the idea is that the platforms and the technology of the sharing economy they're designed to provide for us. And in that respect, they should be managed as a commons. And if you want to read a really great book about the commons, I just read this book by David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner. And it really crystallized a lot of thoughts for me about what is a commons and how do we manage a commons. And his definition is great. It's, a commons may arise whenever a group of people decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner with a special regard for equitable access, use, and long-term stewardship. And if you're thinking about the platforms of the sharing economy as a commons, and even thinking about these technological platforms, the peer-to-peer platforms like Airbnb and Lyft, what if those types of platforms were operated with that goal to provide for people in an equitable manner, and to ensure long-term access in youth. Probably they wouldn't be owned by for-profit corporations that are designed primarily to earn billions of dollars for their investors. And that's where nonprofits come in. Nonprofits and cooperatives are types of entities and corporations that are really designed to do something completely different. And in that respect, nonprofits and cooperatives are an ideal platform, or it's an ideal container through which we will be creating platforms of the sharing economy through which we can build a new commons. And I know everybody here knows what a nonprofit is. I thought I'd bring up cooperatives also and explain what that is because a lot of people have sort of preconceptions about what it is. But a lot of people think, oh, it's an organization where they have a lot of long meetings and people are always getting frustrated and they talk too much. But a cooperative actually, and it's legal DNA is two very simple things. It is an organization where the board is elected on a one-member, one-vote basis. So the amount of money you put into a cooperative does not determine how much power you get. And it's also an organization where the profits, if there are profits, are distributed back to the users, the members on the basis of how much they patronize the cooperative or how much they use the platform, how much value they generated for it. So simply investing money in a company doesn't earn you more money. So cooperatives are not a platform to make the rich richer. They're a platform on which people can come together and provide for one another. So it's a very powerful thing. I'm going to skip through a few other slides very quickly, but we need to encourage a culture of sharing. I think nonprofits have a huge role to play in that, just sort of teaching people the educational, or using education to teach people a lot of the new cultural norms that we need. We also need to work on our sharing skills because the more we collaborate with one another, the more we need to cultivate good communication skills, good management skills, and so on. We also need to design laws and policies and legal structures to enable a sharing world. And that's where my organization focuses most of our work. And I have to say there's a lot of need there. And overall, a lot of these types of things that I've listed here at this point in history are very hard to create because we don't have broad understanding of what they are and what their value is. There are a lot of legal barriers. There aren't a lot of great replicable models, but that's where all of us come in. And I think as we begin to remove a lot of these barriers, we're going to, I think, get to a tipping point where this becomes the new normal. And every town around the world is going to want to establish organizations like this because it provides for us so much better. A couple quick resources, shareable.net is one of my favorite sources of information about the sharing economy and what's happening. The Center for a New American Dream is also a really wonderful organization where you can watch a lot of webinars about the sharing economy and find a lot of resources to download. And I guess I'll just leave you with this quote because this is another David Bollier quote. And he said that really we will soon become to a greater extent more like protagonists in our lives and begin to participate in managing the resources critical to our lives. And that to me is what a sharing economy is for, looking around our communities, looking at the resources we have coming together and cooperating with one another to make sure that everybody's needs are met. So we are really creating a new commons with everything around us. And this last slide is my organization, the Sustainable Economies Law Center. And you can see some of our resources listed here. Thank you. Really, really interesting stuff. Thank you so much for that Janelle. And I have to say I really love your little captions on your stick figures. I was like, I'll put the zucchini. That's great. Well, and I think the point that you made where we can take some of this sharing good-willed nature, excitement, and enthusiasm from within our communities about sharing and really help create, I like how you use the containers and the platforms to enable those to be stronger and more stable and more widespread. So I think that's a great goal. So from me donating eggs from my backyard chickens or participating in the babysitting co-op that there are more structured ways to do that so that it could benefit even more people. And I think that's a really terrific way to kind of envision that. And so to look at a really terrific vision that has come to fruition, I want to invite our last speaker, Jose Kinyones from the Mission Asset Fund to join us on the line to talk a little bit about how he has done this and taking what were traditional tandas or lending circles in the Latino community here in the Mission District of San Francisco and created a really successful organization that was just recently honored with the Clinton Global Initiative and getting many accolades for being so successful and doing what they do. So welcome, Jose. We're so glad to have you. Tell us a little bit about that success. Thank you for inviting me to the conversation. And also thank you for your mind for really setting it up for us to tell our story because I think the math story we're sort of kind of getting into the shared economy conversation but that frankly we didn't necessarily start there. We kind of started our work by trying to solve the problem at the community level. And I want to talk to you guys about what the problem is and how we sort of developed our systems and platforms and even addressing the legislative policy barriers to do what we're doing. But it's everything that you know you just sort of laid out. So I was really amazed by that. So what we are, we're a nonprofit organization. We started our work here in San Francisco in the Mission District trying to solve the problem of getting people into the financial mainstream. And I'm trying to change, oh here we go. So we were trying to help low-income immigrants primarily to getting into the financial mainstream. We noticed that a lot of our clients, our target clients were not having problems getting access to checking accounts, savings accounts. And because of that they were relegated to dealing with check cashers that were charging them, a lot of money just to cash their checks. But then soon enough of course we realized that that wasn't just a problem of folks here in the Mission District San Francisco but this was actually a national wide problem of people being what we call in the shadows in the financial shadows where they were invisible, they were stuck, and they were also strapped. I mean like 54 million people have no access to affordable credit because they essentially have no credit history, no credit score. I mean 17 million adults are on bank meaning that they have no bank account or check and account or savings account. And without access to the financial mainstream or financial products and services that we all take for granted is extremely difficult to actually build financial security through time. And of course this compounded with the fact that folks are essentially stuck in the economy as a whole where wages have not gone up at all, they're sort of flat or people are really having a difficult time making ends meet. And when they don't have access to low cost credit they actually have to turn to high cost credit like paid in lenders that charge an extreme amount of money. And so people are really are strapped overall where they're getting to pay a lot for the credit that they have. And they're spending a great deal of their income, kind of close to 10% of their income just to pay them for financial services or like interest and other fees. So what we wanted to do is to address that problem head on. So what can we do to actually bring about some change? And so what we did was figure it out that we needed to recognize what people were doing. We needed to recognize that people were coming together to helping each other actually manage their own money. But that sort of coming together was not being recognized by the financial system as a whole. And so this is where we kind of came to notice that people come together in Danda that's the term that people know of in Mexico. But then we realized that that activity that comes together and lending each other money was a common worldwide phenomenon. And it's a worldwide phenomenon that has been happening for many, many years. It was sort of like it was crowdsourcing before crowdsourcing. It was credit unions before credit unions. It was peer-to-peer before peer-to-peer. It was activity that people sort of come together and help each other out. And so what we wanted to do is to basically recognize that as a legitimate financial transaction that needed to be uplifted and protected and then used as a starting point to help them into the financial mainstream. But in order to do that, we needed to be really savvy with how we use technology, how we would ever transform it, how we would ever recognize that activity in a legitimate way, and also build our infrastructure, build a platform so that we can get to scale. And so the activity itself, again, our essential strategy here is to formalize the informal so that that way we can bring some structure to what's already taking place. And the way we essentially do that is by having members in the lending circle or in the Thundas essentially sign promissory notes that basically transform what they were doing in an informal way where nobody was recognizing what they were doing into now a legal basis so that that way we can then report that activity to the credit bureaus. So by having people sign a promissory note, we actually formalize what they're doing without actually having them to change what they're doing or to get them to modify their behavior into what we traditionally think of in the financial mainstream ourselves. So by formalizing their formal, that's really the centerpiece of our work and how we're helping people kind of get into the financial mainstream. So the way we're helping do that, to do that in a cost-effective manner is essentially by leveraging technology. We did create a platform where we actually do provide access to our services to other nonprofit organizations so that they can actually use the platform to then deliver the program to their own respective clients. So building it and creating it here in the Mission District, we're now actually operating through 30 different organizations across 10 different states in the United States. And we're just getting started in our path to scale this particular program. So we have technology as an essential, the platform was key for actually making this work in a cost-effective manner with the limited resources that we have. And then through that particular platform, we are able to also provide financial education, financial management training, some advice even through a two-way text messaging sort of campaign so that way we can kind of keep our clients fully engaged throughout their lending circle and even beyond. And so technology has been sort of key for us to maintain that engagement in a way that doesn't break the bank account, that's a word. And some of the impact of our success is just by us taking what people are already doing with their money and by formalizing it and reporting it to the credit bureau we've been able to track that we're helping people improve their credit scores by 168 points just again by sending positive payment information to the credit bureaus. Within a span of 10 months we've seen a 90% success rate by helping people establish a credit score, meaning that if somebody starts without a credit score at time zero by the 10th month in that process, 90% of those folks actually do start to register in the credit reporting system. And in past 10 months it actually gets to 100% success rate. And most importantly of all, I think is our ability to help people manage their debt that within those 10 months period we actually saw people were kind of correcting their financial situation a bit so that they were actually able to reduce the high cost there by over $1,000. We actually did a study where we had compared our clients to a control group and the control group in the same amount of time their debt actually went up by over $3,000. So that was just to demonstrate that this particular approach of formalizing or providing that structure and a piece of mind for people that they can then be able to restructure their finances so that they can actually lower their high cost debt. And we've managed close to $3 million now in total volume. And this is again people's own money that we are servicing on their behalf. And we provide this service at a zero interest, zero fee basis for them. And the last slide in my presentation is what we're trying to do with scale is by using the technology, by using the platform and also recognizing that this particular activity is not just a permanent thing to the Latino immigrant community but also works for the Asian community, Chinese community, with the Southeast Asian community, with people who are all over throughout the African countries. They all do them in circles. What we want to do is actually use the platform that we created to engage organizations, nonprofit organizations in their respective communities and provide them access to the platform so that they can have then the tool to deliver the program with their respective people. And of course then using technology to actually then provide that skill set, that financial education awareness so that they can improve their financial security through time. So this is really what we mean by scaling our impact. And we have a vision of working with over 100 organizations in the coming years. So that is the last slide of my presentation. Thank you, Jose. Thank you so much. And really interesting, so we've got, feel free to type your questions into the chat. I'll go ahead and get started with a couple. So Jose, if you want to stay on the line, we had a couple of questions come in during your presentation asking. So Mantra asks, how is this fascinating system with Mission Asset Fund, how is this different from microcredit financing? So maybe like, how is it different from Akiva, for example? Yeah, there's a significant difference in that imagine a group of 10 people coming together and then those 10 people are the ones that are both lending and borrowing at the same time. So those 10 people put in $100 each and then you come up with $1,000. And then that one person gets $1,000. And then next month they all do that all over again and then the second person gets $1,000. And they do that in rotation until everybody gets $1,000. So that is the basis of a lending circle, which is sort of a closed circuit lending and borrowing with each other. And what we do is essentially just service those social loans for them and then report their payments to the credit bureaus. But Akiva is a little bit different. We have lenders that are pulling money together to lend to a very specific person. And then that person pays those lenders back, right? And then they do that at a theater or an interest rate. So the lenders never become borrowers. In the lending circle, a product, in that model, all the lenders will become borrowers at the same time. So it's a different sort of incentive there, you know, just structurally. Yeah, and I think that the relationship in hierarchy is actually pretty important too that it's not us, the big entity that's loaning the money, it's your neighbor down the block who's pitching in. And then you're pitching in back for them so that they can invest in whatever they need to, whether it's paying off a bill or putting a down payment on a car that they need or whatever it might be. So I think that's really a great way to formalize it and to also then help them build real credit worthiness in our massive financial system where no credit equals bad credit, right? Well, no credit equals no access to the financial systems at all. I mean, without the credit score, without the credit history, you can't get an apartment, you can't buy a car, and in a lot of places in the country you can't even get a job. So that is like the benefit that we bring in by formalizing it, by bringing that sort of legal structures to it. But just to underscore that those 10 people are each other's friends, colleagues, family members. These are people themselves that do this without, again, that investor from the outside coming in and lending. But this is like what they already do. And all we're doing is just, again, providing that technology and the platform to formalize what they're already doing. And that, in essence, is like, I think that the pure sense of the sharing economy where people are really sharing each other's savings to lend it to each other, knowing that that's going to come back to them at some point in that process. That's terrific. And it really does build on the community and the humanity of sharing. And also the accountability of sharing, that you don't necessarily have the same heart strings that get pulled when you think, I don't know if I'm going to pay that bill back, or that loan from the cash checking place. Whereas if you know it's your neighbor down the block, then that sort of method of accountability is also there, which I think is really interesting. We had a couple of other questions that came in for you. So Bridget asked, Jose, I saw a Florida pin on the last slide. Is it just one location that you're working in there? What city, if so, or are these just places you're aspiring to expand? You know, in fact, in the past two months we've established a new partnership with a group in Miami. They're called Catalyst Miami. And so we definitely are starting the program there. And I think they're going to be kicking off the Lending Circles program within the next two or three months. But yeah, we're very excited about that. We have in our MOU that we'll do maybe monthly site visits in South Miami Beach, I think. So we're definitely looking forward to going to Miami more often. Terrific. Well, those will be some fun trips in your future, no doubt. I'm going to go ahead and bring Jeremiah back on the line. And we'll probably have a couple of other questions for you too, Jose, in a moment. But so Nancy, after you initially mentioned that there are three other areas that you're going to be expanding your honeycomb to include in different sections of the collaborative economy from your view. She bit. She wants to know, what are those other three? Sure. And I'm open to feedback. I don't know what the — I haven't tightened them down, but I believe we're going to head into these three. One will be health. The second will be utilities. And the third will be education. And I'll give a few examples. In the health space, we're seeing sharing sites like helparound.co where diabetes patients can share insulin alerts and other things when you travel afar. So people are turning to each other rather than traditional healthcare. On utilities, we're seeing the rise of peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networks and also people are sharing power and energy and even solar power. And then the third one, education, and I'm sure there's a lot of experts here, the rise of MOOCs and also Udemy and other online peer-to-peer type base services are starting to develop. I have a lot less examples than I do in the other six categories, so I'm looking for submissions. Send them over to me. Tweet them to me. And I'll be thankful if you can do that. So those are the three. Really interesting. And I think one of the points that I think Janelle made that I thought was really interesting is that we have seen this huge expansion of the sharing economy in these past few years as we hit the trough of the recession and have come out of it. And so we are seeing that there's a need for it. It's not just necessarily a hey, this might be fun. It's a hey, there's something not being served here that needs to be let's fill that gap. And I think it's a really interesting opportunity for nonprofits and public libraries who have in a lot of ways been filling that space, like libraries are the place that people who had to cut their cable and internet have gone to do job searching online and have been able to use the resources in their local library. And so I think it's interesting to think about the expansion of things like utilities like public Wi-Fi and community shared Wi-Fi as a new growth area as well. So I'd love to have Janelle come back on the line. We had a couple of questions that were more directed to you. One asking, is there really a list of types of business models? For example, like a co-op versus a condo versus fractional ownership versus membership. Is there a resource that somebody could look to to find a list of what kinds of models they could look at or what kinds exist? I actually love to just tell people that the possibilities are really endless and it really helps to just start with questions like how are we going to manage this financially? If people invest their money, what are they going to get? What happens when they leave? How are we going to govern this? Is it Democratic? Is the board going to elect the board? And all of these questions can be answered differently. And sometimes it doesn't really matter what type of entity you choose so much as like how you structure the governance. But in every state there are different entities that you can choose that do create limits that are very important. So nonprofits and cooperatives are types of corporations you can form in every state. And it's kind of like creating a container that doesn't allow you to maximize profits of investors. And that's a really powerful thing because profit maximization is such a magnetic force in our society. And unless we really build boundaries to keep that out of the building of the commons then a lot of the projects that we create that are really intended to provide for us could start drifting toward the for-profit realm. I don't know if that answers the question, but it really varies depending on where you are and what your goals are. That's interesting. And I would recommend that people definitely check out some of the resources and white papers and research that's available at Janelle's organization at Sustainable Economies Law Center's website. There's a lot there. So if you want to dig into those different models and some of the different platforms and containers that she mentioned, there's a lot there to give you some more inspiration. We have a question, and so I'd bring Jose back on the line for this one from a Kelly who's asking, do you have any insight into lending circles where people have to buy in? And she comments they're usually women-only groups. Sometimes they're accused of being predatory. So how do you distinguish, how do you deal with the reputation and the accountability to ensure that what's a good lending circle versus what's a predatory one? And I can say I've been part of some diaper co-ops online where everybody buys together to get stuff in bulk from China or wherever it's being produced instead of going to the store to buy it. And sometimes people just walk off with all your money. So how do you help with that accountability? And is there a default rate that you encountered? That's a great question. And I think this is what the fundamental aspects of us about formalizing that transaction or those agreements, having legal structure that can sustain those agreements. Because when there's a lot of informal agreements, again, anybody can just walk off and then there's no repercussions to that person. And so what we're trying to do is to say, you know, in our program by formalizing, by getting everybody signed a promissory note, we then help people accountable because if they don't follow up with their commitments, then we report negative information to the credit bureaus that we can actually go after them in a court of law if we need to. And what really was important about that is that we're using the legal infrastructure in our society to sustain this particular activity and to minimize that risk. And in our default rate it's actually less than 1%. In the industry standard, in the micro lending world, it's more like 10% to 12%. And so by bringing that legal structure, it brings people peace of mind to what's actually happening. And as a nonprofit, they give us their trust that we're going to follow through without commitment. And I have to protect what they're doing. I mean, the best way that I can describe it is that we're sort of like a mini-SDIC or social loans, you know, how the SDIC secures our own money in checking accounts. And that's why we have peace of mind that that money is always going to be there. And we can actually take away, you know, remove the money we need to. No matter what happens to a particular bank, right? You know, we're doing the same thing for this particular activity. And so that's actually a very important element that actually minimizes that predatory nature of a very informal lending circles that are out there. Really interesting. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up since we are right at the top of the hour and apologize for those questions. We didn't get a chance to respond to and just show a few other resources as we wrap up. So in our links here in the slide deck that you'll receive in a bit are some of the sites that you can visit of those of our presenters and the ones that they had recommended visiting for more inspiration and more study into how this economy is manifesting itself in so many different ways. Additionally, I'd like to point you to some of the content that we've been writing here through TechSoup's networks on how nonprofits and libraries and local community organizers can engage in different ways with the sharing economy as well as one post from Beth Cantor. So those links will also be included. Thank you so much to all three of you for taking the time to share your expertise today. Really, really interesting conversation that I hope will be able to continue here at TechSoup and with you as well. I'd like to invite everybody to join us for future webinars. We have some coming up that are specifically for libraries and how to engage in their communities with mobile technologies. So we have one on July 30th and another one on mobile-friendly youth services at your library on the 13th of August. Additionally, if you're looking for ways to further captivate and engage your constituents with your website, join us on the 31st of July. And then on August 7th, we'll be doing a tour slash Q&A session to help those of you who are new to TechSoup and you're interested in getting the donations available from our donor partners to join us then and learn about how to access all of those donations and products available to you. Lastly, I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for the use of their platform today that allows us to present these helpful and timely webinars to you on a regular basis. When you close your screen out this afternoon, please take a moment to complete the post-event survey so that we can continue to help and improve our webinar programming for your needs. Thank you so much, everyone. Really appreciate you joining us. And thank you to Ali for helping on the back end. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye.