LOS ANGELES, Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- GOOD Worldwide LLC, a mission-driven business focused on helping people live well and do good, today announced the launch of good.is, a community platform where members can read GOOD-published editorial, follow people and organizations they respect, share news they care about, and find relevant, actionable opportunities to make an impact.
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Good.is unites like-minded people who share civic goals and a creative sensibility into a community through which members inspire one another toward driving positive change. Instead of championing one individual cause, good.is creates a place where people can join forces in pursuit of overall progress. This evolutionary step follows GOOD's mission of making "doing well by doing good" more attainable, enjoyable and widespread.
"The challenge we face is that problems work extremely well together. For instance, education problems support employment problems. And employment problems lead to income problems, which in turn drive health problems, and so on," said Ben Goldhirsh, founder of GOOD Worldwide. "Meanwhile, the social impact space is extremely fragmented – siloed communities are doing great work for education, poverty and health individually – but there is not consistent coordination. Problems gang up on us so we need to do the same. We need to play a team game in order to make an impact."
Good.is answers the question: "What can I do to make things better?"
The site offers thought-provoking content meant to inspire and help people find ways to get involved and make a difference. While GOOD editors will continue to contribute features and shorter-length pieces, members can also add stories and actionable opportunities from anywhere on the web, and in turn, add those opportunities to a personalized "To Do" list, which inspires others and drives visible results.
Joining the community is free. Once visitors sign up and create a profile, they can discover, invite and follow people they respect, participate in the conversation, share stories and opportunities to do good, and take part in "Dos." The site has already attracted some influential members like Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water, and Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and founder of Jumo, a social activist platform that GOOD acquired in 2011.
"When Jumo merged with GOOD the hope was to build a single community of engaged citizens and mission-driven organizations. We all believed that socially-minded people needed a place to convene, join forces, learn from one another and take action together – I think the new good.is can be that place," said Hughes. "At Jumo, we focused on how technology could help people have a meaningful impact on the world, while GOOD has its roots in media as a force for change. Bringing these together, the new good.is is furthering that vision we all shared. As one of its first members, I'm looking forward to learning from and sharing with this community."
Good.is is an evolutionary milestone for GOOD Worldwide
The launch marks an important new step for GOOD Worldwide, founded in 2006 by Ben Goldhirsh, Casey Caplowe and Max Schorr as a magazine to shine a light on a budding cultural movement: a growing dedication to positively and proactively engaging with the world. At that time, "do-gooder" was looked at as a pejorative. GOOD repositioned "doing good" as being powerful, important, pragmatic and sexy. Six years later, the experiment that started as GOOD has seen tremendous success, experienced exponential growth and has expanded its offerings from being a magazine to a media company that reaches millions of people a month. Simultaneously, the notion of "doing good" has evolved. It doesn't only imply pure altruism or self-sacrifice, or mean choosing between doing good for the world and doing well for oneself; one can do both, at the same time, every day.
Recognizing this evolution, the team at GOOD realized that a community-driven platform that connects, informs and empowers people to make a difference would be the next step toward better accomplishing the purpose – to do the most good. In an audience survey, 75 percent of their readers reported that they wished they had friends or others with whom to do good. When respondents were asked what they'd like to see more of from GOOD, nearly 55 percent said they wanted more opportunities for action, and nearly 43 percent said they wanted opportunities to interact with the community.
Enter good.is, a platform that makes doing good attainable and enjoyable, and helps foster a sense of being a part of something that will help better our world.
About GOOD
GOOD (www.good.is) is a global community of, by, and for pragmatic idealists working towards individual and collective progress. Good.is is the platform for collaboration between members of the GOOD community and the organizations and corporations that work with the GOOD community. For each member of GOOD, the mission is to learn and do what's good for you and good for all.
SOURCE GOOD Worldwide LLC
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