OMG, I’m a blogger. I’ve dreaded this moment. With 90M blogs, I always wondered, why would anyone want one more option – from me? But Small Change Fund’s Ruth Richardson is a force of nature – with a compelling value proposition for social change. So here I am, blogging about small grants at 6:00 A.M.

Small Change Fund, the newest member of the Greengrants Alliance of Funds, has the kind of ‘hybrid vigor’ that is contagious.  With its new website and blog, Small Change Fund will become a new portal for vigorous debate about how small causes can have big effects – like the ‘butterfly effect.’ And they’ve asked me to start that debate – I’ll be SCF’s first guest blogger until March. I plan to use this opportunity to tell you what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m reading, and to throw out a few questions to kick around.

On Wednesday I was in Palo Alto to meet with the Skoll Foundation about small grants, and the Moore Foundation (about small grants), and then in Sausalito to meet with the Association of Small Foundations and Northern California Grantmakers about international grants (and small grants of course). Finally, it was the Global Fund for Women and Marion Rockefeller Weber’s Flow Fund Circle to discuss her ideas for ‘capillary philanthropy’ – a system which gets money to the deepest roots of communities without the burden of “impact and accountability reports.”

I’m reading What Would Google Do? at the suggestion of Steve Gunderson, the President and CEO of the Council on Foundations who recommended it to his Board which is meeting in Washington in March just ahead of the “Foundations on the Hill” initiative. My question is do you think the internet and social media can change the world? John Tierney touches on this in a recent Science Times article – “The Madness of Crowds and the Internet Delusion.”

He talks about You Are Not A Gadget, the latest book by Jaron Lanier (the internet guru who coined the term “virtual reality” who now believes that unpaid web content is being exploited by the “lords of the clouds” like Google at the expense of individual creativity – he questions the original hailing of the idea that wonderful possibilities would be realized once the internet allowed the world to instantly share their work, their dreams, their passions. What do you think?