Integral Social Ventures

CARBON REDUCTION

TerraPass helps you calculate your carbon footprint, learn how to reduce it, and balance it out through the purchase of verified carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are a means of funding clean energy and carbon reduction projects that help to fight global warming.

TerraPass has products for all of the major activities responsible for carbon emissions: driving, flying, and home energy use. They also offer products to balance emissions from college dorm energy use, wedding or events, and business energy use.

TerraPass funds three types of leading-edge projects: wind power; farm power such as dairy farm methane digesters; and landfill methane capture.

website: www.terrapass.com

MICROFINANCE

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org , you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence.

Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

website:  www.kiva.org

PERMACULTURE

Agência Mandalla has developed a simple irrigation system which allows fruit and vegetables to grow even in the semi-desert.  Small farmers have their own water reservoir and mini-plantation.  Nine beds are laid out in a circle around a circular water basin six meters in diameter. Water is taken from this to irrigate the beds and is distributed via pipe circuits two meters apart. The first three circular beds of the mandala provide staple foods for the family. The fourth to sixth circles are for cash crops of fruit and vegetables. In the outer circles, fruit trees, bananas and palm trees are grown to provide shade. The entire mandala is enclosed by a cacti fence. Fish and ducks are raised in the basin, fertilizing the irrigation water with their excrement.

 website:  www.agenciamandalla.org.br