Mari Kuraishi is a co-founder and a President of GlobalGiving.org, a charity fundraising web site founded in 2002. Whether to rescue a Primate from illegal trafficking, to help supply food for Earthquake survivors in Nepal or to raise public awarness on waste in Armenia, everyone is encouraged to choose a project and donate. Since 2002, GlobalGiving has raised almost $190.000.000 from around 470,000 donors who have supported 12,477 projects.

Mari Kuraishi says: „The world is full of problems, but we are full of solutions“. This is the reflection of the core idea of the first and largest global crowdfunding community for nonprofits. Everyone can donate as little as $10 with maximum unlimited to support a project and to receive a report on it afterwards.

Prior to GlobalGiving, Mari worked at the World Bank where she managed and created some of the Bank’s most innovative projects, she earned a BA in history from Harvard and did graduate work in Russian and Japanese history and politics at Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Except for English and Japanese she also speaks Russian, Italian and French.

Kuraishi is working hard to increase her platform’s impact on the nonprofits it serves. As she says around 40 percent of her partners log into Global giving every week to test new tools to improve their effectiveness. She wants people and partners to think about platform as of Global Behavioral Laboratery, where they can test new incentives and find new funding streams. 

At the conference Development and democracy Mari Kuraishi will instruct us how to encourage givings among people or how to promote donations for foreign humanitarian and development projects. She will share her experiences and innovations in the field of fundraising and project management.

Mari Kuraishi will appear at the conference as a speaker within the Kapuscinski Development Lectures Programme, which is a joint initiative of the European Commission, the United Nations Development Programme and the Pontis Foundation. More about Kapuscinski Development Lectures and planned events: http://kapuscinskilectures.eu