Pro Bono Work and Charity Support

    Bridges supports:

    1) The Munich Hilton Hotel Christmas tree on behalf of an orphanage

    2) The Münchner Business Plan Wettbewerb

    Bridges also encourages donating time and energy, or money, to the below, the last three of which are treated on their respective subpages:

    3) Question Box to provide people in poor rural areas the power of the Internet

    4) Junior Achievement (JA) for business education to young people

    5) Micro-lending for people starting businesses in developing countries

    6) the Gayan Book Foundation to be begun in Mumbai, India

    7) Save the Elephants (its subpage is at Mission)

    Brief discussions of the first four follow here.

Introduction

    Many successful entrepreneurs have started foundations, caritative trusts and charitable organizations – or donated enormous sums to them. Historically the Fuggers (Augsburg, Germany, as of the 15th century), Rothschilds (originally out of Frankfurt, as of the 19th century) and the U.S. Rockefellers (as of the 20th century) have made, in U.S. pecuniary terms, multi-billion dollar philanthropic contributions. Among the more notable recently founded multi-billion dollar foundations are those of computer giants Hewlett and Packard, Bill Gates, and the financiers George Soros and Warren Buffet. A goal of Bridges is also to participate in philanthropy, albeit per force with less impressive resources.

    Unfortunately members of Bridges have seen countless well-intentioned initiatives, ranging from small private ones to mammoth Word Bank ones, go awry in India, Latin America and all over Africa as well. As laudatory as ambitious wide-ranging charitable projects are, they tend to be fraught with the perils of cultural clash, implementation failure, corruption, malfeasance and peculation. Sometimes their leitmotiv veritably appears to be “over-promise, under-perform.”

    The world is run, one may say, by one million politicians, ten million business magnates and one hundred million bureaucrats. “The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much as we are told!”¹ Even from the very top of the pyramid, one cannot “save the world.” However by tackling a specific, narrowly defined problem one can, indeed, make a difference. Therefore the position of Bridges is that  its coaches should endeavor to play a significant role in selected charitable initiatives, one manageable problem, one pressing need, one specific location at a time.²

1) The Munich Hilton Hotel Christmas Tree

    In the lobby of the Munich Hilton there is a towering Christmas tree every year. It is decorated with cards written by children from a local orphanage. In each card a child describes a gift he would like to receive. Hotel guests peruse the cards, find one they like, purchase the gift, and leave it at reception. Hilton then organizes with the orphanage a party for the children at which the gifts are distributed.

    As Bridges expands, we encourage our coaches to introduce this concept to other premier hotels in their cities of residence.

2) The Münchner Business Plan Wettbewerb www.mbpw.de

    The concept of Business Plan (BP) Competitions was developed in the 1980s by M.I.T. In 1996/97 this concept was introduced to Germany by McKinsey & Company. It is supported by companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, and Siemens in cooperation with the Economic Ministry of Bayern. The emphasis is on student teams, but anyone may compete. Just five years after its inception more than 150 firms had been founded by participants, with over 100 million Euros invested by venture capital firms. Over 350 coaches and jurors dedicate time to helping the participants at all stages of the process.

3) The Question Box http://questionbox.org 
    Given the Bridges Q³ strategy methodology based on questions, the concept of the Question Box is particularly appealing to us. One brings the power of the Internet to answer questions for people in developing areas, especially poor rural communities. Many of these communities do not even have electricity, let alone computers!
    The basic concept is that a person from there uses a mobile phone to telephone someone in front of a computer who immediately starts Internet research. Question Box was launched in India, followed by Uganda. Questions have ranged from critical farming issues and helping children with homework to trivia about celebrities.

    Rose Shuman had the idea and developed the concept. She wrote an excellent article about its implementation: "How We Killed Our Strategy to Save Our Mission," on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, July 5th, 2011. A statement in that article every entrepreneur and manager should note who ventures into unknown markets is: "We assumed that our assumptions about user behaviors and on-the-ground realities would be wrong. We were completely correct on that front."

    She is a Phi Betta Kappa³ graduate of Brown University (one of the eight Ivy League ones, the most famous of which are Yale, Harvard and Princeton.) The Question Box initiative is one from Open Mind, a non-profit company in California of which she is the founder and CEO, while also being a partner at BrightFront Group, a global consulting firm.

4) Junior Achievement www.ja.org