HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:

Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.

At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.

I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.

Pangea Day looks amazing. Trailers for it have been playing after every TED talk for months, now, and I finally clicked over to check it out.

Starting at 18:00 GMT [Note: 11AM on the US west coast] on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Here’s a provocative example:

There will be public and private viewings all over the world, including about twenty in San Francisco:

A great article in the NYT. Long, but worth it. Excerpt:

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Thanks, Stephen.