Welcome to Aidpage!

Aidpage is a special place where people help each other by speaking out and paying attention to each other.

What TO DO on Aidpage

1. Speak out

Describe your problems and needs. Or, tell a success story - about overcoming problems.

You may have already posted something - a comment, a question, or a short note. Add to it - write more. You may not be ready to write today - no problem. Come back tomorrow - add more info about yourself, make new pages, and insert pictures in your posts. The more you write and post pictures - the more people would be willing to come to your pages and write back to you.

2. Pay attention

Browse the pages of other aidmates - people will see that you are paying attention to them. Once they see that you have visited, they'd most likely pay a visit back to your own page.

Post comments and questions on the pages of other aidmates. Don't be shy. This is the purpose of Aidpage - to get people pay attention to each other.

What NOT to do on Aidpage

1. Do NOT post your email address, phone number, or street address on your public aidpages if you don't want to get a lot of spam and fraudulent offers in your mail and over the phone.
   
   People will contact you through messages here on Aidpage.
   
   Why is it safer to use Aidpage messages? Because spammers and scammers would have to register on Aidpage in order to communicate with you - and they normally don't want to do that. Even if they register as aidmates, once they start spamming, they are quickly discovered and removed from the system.
   
2. If looking for help, do NOT ask directly for money. Explain your problems and let people decide how they could help you. You cannot be sure what kind of help is best for you.

We created Aidpage so that people come together to help each other. We believe that web enabled "peer-to-peer" micro-helping will meet needs not readily met by government, nonprofits, or business.

Aidpage is a response to two related problems affecting millions of people in the US and globally - (1) erosion of traditional support networks, and (2) institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive.

Erosion of traditional support networks

Today's global markets by all definitions do not exactly "care" about individual livelihoods. People generally accept this as a fact of life, try to prepare accordingly, and do not expect "help" from the markets. People try to develop high levels of competitiveness, autonomy, mobility, and capability to change. This, however, accelerates the disintegration of traditional social environments built on cooperation, mutual dependencies, locality, and predictability - like extended family, neighborhoods, childhood friends, etc.

The erosion of these traditional environments has two aspects - (1) the psychological loss of informal, unconditional "giving and taking", and (2) the practical loss of a historically well established support layer for people "in need."

We design Aidpage as the "people aid people" platform - based on the following principles:

• person-to-person giving is a basic human need
• empathy and compassion need no incentives nor conditions
• everybody always "gives" and "takes"
• immediacy and informality work better than "process"
• people are "wired" for trust.

Institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive

Institutionalized aid (government and nonprofit) in the US is a huge system driven by over a trillion in tax and donation dollars annually. The distribution system is so complicated and vast that it is rather opaque to traditional processes of public scrutiny. Episodic media interest - notably after big disasters - "let's see how the money will be spent" - is only scratching the surface of the problems. Despite recent well intended efforts, nonprofit organizations still largely operate as purely private organizations that do not feel enough pressure or need to be transparent to the public. The knowledge about the bysantine mechanics of the aid system is embodied in fully blown professional occupations like fundraising, program development, grant making, grant administration, grant writing, grant consulting, etc.

Most people turning to government aid are already having trouble coping with competitive markets. They are indeed looking for unconditional assistance. True, there are the big "entitlement" programs like Medicare and Social Security. But also true is that many other vital areas of government support are strictly conditional, competition-based, selective, restrictive, outcome based, and policy driven - such as student aid, medical expenses assistance, small business assistance, housing and home repair assistance, etc. Average Jane and Joe have to "inquire", "apply", "prove", "qualify", "compete", "perform", and "report" - to get the aid that is funded by their own tax money. If only they knew how to do all this.

Nonprofit aid has even more openly discriminatory distribution policies - tolerated on the assumption that the money is "private". But let's see how "private" is it. Annually, the nonprofit sector gets about $250 billion in tax incentivized private donations ($210 billion of them from individuals)... and about $390 billion from government grants and contracts - pure taxpayers' money that is (see data source).

Access to institutionalized aid is acutely problematic for the intended beneficiaries. Naturally, there is an unending public interest in the "who, how, how much, and why" of the distribution processes and outcomes. And there is an unending frustration with the complexity, lack of transparency, selectiveness, and competitiveness of a system whose main purpose is to help people.

Information on these processes is publicly available - residing in thousands of different sources and formats. However, the information is one sided - it is only produced by institutions and naturally reflects "institutional" points of view and bureaucratic "defending of turf." The other main participants and de facto "owners" of the system - the aid beneficiaries - do not have any outlets, formats, or platforms they could use to publicly speak out, discuss, and reflect on these processes. Money wise - the system is a full circle from the public up and then from the institutions down. But information wise - it works one way only... whenever it works... to the extent it works.

We design Aidpage as a bottom up conversational media:

• aggregating large bodies of information offered by participating publishers
• easy self-publishing (blog-like but non-geek)
• audience participation on each page - commenting, adding of links, system-wide communication
• system-wide findability - search, tagging
• public space, mutual visibility, transparency.

See also:

• Why Aidpage? (a more passionate answer from my partner Ivan Ivanov)

Taking the mystery out of obtaining a grant...

From the research I have done, I am beginning to understand why, when organizations place a request for a grant, it is a collaborative effort. That is, many of the staff get involved in the steps of finding, qualifying, collecting, verifying, and writing the draft, as well as checking, and changing as needed, before anything is turned into for final approval and before it is finally drafted and signed off on, then submitted by the deadline imposed by the grants committee. No easy task...

There are many steps, the first being - identifying the appropriate grant for your stated purpose. I read an article yesterday on a public broadcast site regarding a grant they are going to be giving.The stipulations were immense, and it became clear that matching the purpose with the requirements is a job in itself.

The first step in locating a grant is you must define your purpose.This is done by clarifying the purpose of your project by writing a concise mission statement. Once accomplished, seek funding that is a match for your project, including who will benefit, and how the grant money will be applied to meet the stated purpose. That's just in the preliminary phase, and the work hasn't even begun in processing the application.

So, I am wondering, as I am only one person, do I have the ability to identify, locate, define, collect, and process such a request, alone? I don't know.

I have been given a couple tools called the Federal Money Retriever and another called the Grant Gate. These are two databases which contain a huge number of institutions, both private,non-profits,and governmental sources which are in the business of giving grants to causes. Some contain grants only to organizations, some will give monies to individuals. What is important, as I see it, is the tools are instrumental in the search. They've taken a lot of information and made it possible for someone to locate the right grants, and research these as well.

There's a lot of hubbub on the internet about "getting a grant", such as, the Lesco fiasco. Basically, Matthew Lesco is a consultant who has put together a lot of information to sell to people who do not know anything about grants. People think when buying his products that they will be able to get a grant, simply by buying his products. This is incorrect. People are so desperate for funding, and hear all the fantastic stories, that they will take the risk by spending money (often money they can't really spare) to become in the know. The problem with this is, once you get the book, you quickly see, it is a bunch of information that doesn't tell you much more than you knew already. And half the phone numbers are outdated or bogus. Years ago I purchased Matthew Lesco's book on grants. I found it to be silly and not very helpful in understanding what one has to do to find a grant, let alone write an application for a grant. Most of what he wrote in there was horse sense, and I think that's what he used to fool people (me included) into purchasing his materials. The truth is, finding a grant is very hard work, and the process in getting a grant is harder still.

That's the beauty in the tools I mentioned. There's no other products anywhere, that takes the stress out of the search as these do. The databases are loaded with GOOD information and direction, and if one is very vigilant, finding the correct grant is made a lot easier. Then your work really begins! So I say, don't be fooled into buying useless junk when you can obtain (for free!) the Federal Money Retriever and the Grant Gate, here at Aidpage.

Now all I have top do is get my courage up to achieve what I have been dreaming of doing.

To learn about the Federal Money Retriever, and the Grant Gate go to:

http://www.idilogic.com

or, read the following Aidpage regarding Idilogic and it's tools:

http://us-federal-government-aid.idilogic.aidpage.com

Happy Hunting,

m_99

Yes, we do have angels on Aidpage. That's how we call the people who do the helping on Aidpage. I think Elaine of TSA came up with the term "angels" (please, correct me if I am wrong).
 
Anyway, we observe roughly two levels of "angel" presence on Aidpage:

1. Spontaneous one-time posting by "passers by" - done by the kind of good willing people who would personally help a stranger without much ado and then would simply go their way without ever returning.
2. Regular posting on multiple pages and topics for many months or even years - now, we are talking super angels here.

The first thing a needy person needs is personal attention - as simple as that. And still, it is the hardest thing to get from an institution or even a busy social worker.
 
So, dear reader of this post - you can be an angel too. Browse Aidpage and read a few posts. Then reply (in a helpful way!) to one or two of them - and voilà, you've become a small "angel" in someone's life. Welcome to Aidpage!