Volunteers sift through hundreds of suggestions

The Mission Possible initiative to find solutions for struggling charities came into sharper focus Tuesday, when 25 volunteers gathered to winnow down the best among hundreds of solutions offered by supporters.

After nearly three hours of discussion, the most popular ideas included:

• Finding easier ways to donate, such as transferring interest paid on checking accounts and rounding up purchases to the nearest dollar for charity.
• Create a central clearinghouse of nonprofit needs and find partners to help meet them.
• Establishing a panel of “angel investors” who would hear ideas from charities that need money.
• Encouraging nonprofits to consolidate administrative functions to save donor dollars.

Also popular was exploring a way to implement Charlotte’s own version of a Chinese program that allows the young to “bank” volunteer hours spent in service of the elderly. Those hours are then reciprocated in later years by the next generation as a sort of “no-cost Social Security.”

More than 350 ideas were submitted through a database created for Mission Possible, a coalition made up of the Observer and eight media partners that sought to alert the public to critical nonprofit needs.

“As all of you know, many of the traditional approaches to charitable causes just aren’t working any more,” Observer Editor Rick Thames told the panelists. “We thought it important to bring new faces to the table, and these 350 ideas represent those new faces.”

The hundreds of ideas could be grouped into a handful of categories, including administrative solutions; donation drives and events; national initiatives brought to Charlotte; online initiatives; and volunteer drives.

Mission Possible was launched with a belief that the public could make a difference, at a time when the recession and the banking crisis had cut into donations and grants to local charities.

Read the full article: Volunteers sift through hundreds of suggestions – CharlotteObserver.com. By Mark Price