Find social impact startups and funding. Currently tracking 2,775 startups and 453 funders, Good Here helps you: - discover social impact startups - connect with the social impact community - find social impact funding.

I think the curation and purpose is great and helps with local mutual aid. However, decoupling "entrepreneurship" with social causes is necessary, that mental model of "startup problem solving" only tackles the symptoms of issues and not the problems that generate the need for the charity. Localizing mutual aid is a strong contribution towards communities, so focus on education and engagement rather than "X product and service will provide Y topical treatment". A good primer on a more impactful way to help society is based in Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and a highlighted concept is False Generosity (great vid: https://youtu.be/DmA4sk2mf88)

@ravi_bajnath Thanks - that's a really great point. At the moment, we wanted to avoid touching on the work of fully fledged charities - there are plenty of directories and databases about registered charities. Instead, we wanted to track new innovations in the social impact space that might not appear elsewhere. A question back to you: if localised mutual aid organisations are not registered charities, but small communities seeing a need and starting an organisation to address an issue, are they social entrepreneurs addressing the symptoms of issues? Or are they addressing the problems generating a need for their startup? And thanks for the video link - I hadn't heard of Freire's theory so will take a look at it now!

@benrmatthews That's a great question because it's not just a semantic difference, but philosophically grounded in a different way of organizing society. The problem is private power and control over resources. Social entrepreneurship can help people, but it operates within bureaucracies to tackle problems caused by the same governing institutions. "The Utopia of Rules" by the recently passed David Graeber cuts through a lot of the arguments for entrepreneurship. The common example of building a water well is used to illustrate how individuals/communities who need to solve a problem are impeded by State institutions. To build a well (or community resource) in my city, you have to contact Local Government and go through the steps of lobbying for an action item for taxable resources, and then build it to local designated (lobbied) code. Whereas mutual aid is simply getting competent people together to build the well without the need of State institutions to solve that issue (subsidiarity). You don't need to be "Well-Builders Incorporated", or even an organized cohort, for essential tasks/services to be fulfilled. The countervailing organization method, for larger purposes, is a Worker Self-Directed Cooperative (Richard D. Wolff/Democracy at Work is a good resource for that). The difference in problem solving includes acting on principles of human virtue (the "goodness"/pragmatics for survival through cooperation) through Direct Action while exposing the monopoly of power (State control through violence) over land (jurisdiction), resources (water, energy, money), and labor (wage labor in non-essential/non-socially engaged occupations for survival). Peter Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" details this further.

@ravi_bajnath Wow, thanks so much! My reading just got a lot longer. Perhaps we need to add a ”Books” category to Good Here? Any other background reading that you’d recommend?

@benrmatthews NP! A books section maybe opening a can of worms, but maybe curation of small and independent online bookstores can be a starting point (with intake from current listed nonprofits).

A great iniciative. Surly gonna take a deep look at it! There is plenty of us looking for a meaningful job, and Good Here seems to be a great way to connect with people like us. Great job!