Start Some Good with Tom Dawkins in Adelaide!

A handful of the Connecting Up Australia team had the pleasure of meeting and hearing from Tom Dawkins, co-founder of crowdfunding website, Start Some Good. Tom has been visiting Australian cities (thanks to TACSI and The School for Social Entrepreneurs) over the past week. He visited the Vibwire Enterprise Hub in Sydney, The Hub in Melbourne, and finished up his speaking mini-tour in Adelaide in front of a small, intimate audience.

Tom spoke about events in his life, culminating in the creation of Start Some Good. His story was amazing, starting from the discovery of a trodden-on brochure for a student exchange program - which led him to a life changing experience in the USA. He shared how over the years, he has spent time with world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, started his own youth media organisation, VibeWire, and been at the cutting edge of digital marketing. As he brought us up to speed with his current work with Start Some Good, it was clear that his wealth of experience and passion to see positive social change happen were real drivers in his efforts to break down barriers facing social entrepreneurs.

While it would be well worth sharing Tom's complete story, here are just four takeaways from his talk in Adelaide:

• Politics is about how we contribute to the creation of society. It's something we all do, all the time.
• The media is the marketplace of ideas
• Two important qualities of a social entrepreneur: 1) naiveté & 2) stubbornness
• The most profound impact a change maker/social entrepreneur creates is not their project, but recruiting other change makers

Start Some Good

Start Some Good is Tom's latest project, with co-founder Alex Budak. It's a fresh platform in the crowdfunding space, and offers a number of great features for people starting a venture, and also for people wanting to support projects:

• It's for social entrepreneurs: There are a number of online fundraising/crowdfunding sites around at the moment, however many of them focus on arts projects or charities. Start Some Good focuses on social entrepreneurs. You don't need to have charity status to apply.
• Focus on organisations over projects: Another issue that surrounds some crowdfunding sites is that once your project has been funded, you lose your connection to the site, and need to start from scratch to fund another project. Start Some Good's focus is on organisations and individuals, so that even if the project is finished, there is still that connection to the organisation or individual which remains on the site. This leads to the next highlight:
• Personal profiles: This is an exciting addition to the crowdfunding space, where your personal profile on Start Some Good can show projects you're supporting and allows you to connect and interact with other people on the site. It's a great way to form community around supporting positive social change.

All in all, Start Some Good is an exciting crowdfunding platform with huge potential to build community around funding projects, individuals and organisations who are involved in social change. Start Some Good this week launched its first set of Australian projects. To support Australian social entrepreneurs or even start raising money for your own project, visit their website at http://www.startsomegood.com.