Crowdfunding is the meeting point between society's insatiable curiosity for innovation and respect for Earth.

Sustainability Development And Its Pillars

Today’s society has led us to live in a dramatically consumerist world, where we abuse of natural resources in order to support our urban and modern lifestyle and needs. The concept of sustainable development focuses on finding a balance between the needs of the present to move forward, technologically and economically, and the need to protect the environment in which we live, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. Starting from our homes, communities and businesses, it is necessary to embrace this concept through our everyday actions and by supporting eco-friendly projects.

Across all sectors of development there are three pillars that need to be carried for a sustainable development:

Economic development: is about controlling what we consume, whilst not compromising the quality of life, which is especially challenging in developing worlds. That translates to providing incentives for businesses to adhere to sustainability guidelines.

Social development and inclusion: focuses on promoting policies that protects the health and wellbeing of people from pollution and other harmful activities of businesses and organisations. Here stands the importance of educating people about these topics.

Environmental protection: the environment needs to be preserved for future generations and this pillar defines how we should study and protect ecosystems. It also involves the development and use of new technologies that can help to create a greener future by innovating upon existing pollution causing processes e.g. renewable energy.

Crowdfunding For Sustainability Projects

Sustainability is a word that is now part of every corporate agenda, with major global companies now targeting structured sustainability goals, relying on the 17 sustainable development goals set out by the UN. Entrepreneurs are also beginning to tackle this issue, with these entrepreneurs increasingly looking to crowdfunding to help support fund their ideas and solutions. Crowdfunding is a great way to fund projects that are promoting social change, as they are powerful method of harnessing the concerns of the community to provide funding to these businesses. In this sense, crowdfunding is an efficient model to create innovation around the three pillars of sustainable development: people, planet and profit.

Crowdfunding is a meeting point between the entrance of the Internet into the private capital formation process and the desire to connect more meaningfully with the things we buy, the things we do and the things we invest in.

The Green crowdfunding niche is becoming more and more popular and many eco-friendly platforms are populating the web. The dutch “Greencrowd”, for example, aims to accelerate the realisation of sustainable energy projects, meanwhile the American “GreenUnit” helps funding US-based eco-friendly projects and wants to educate the world about green topics such as global warming. The Australian “The Green Crowd” supports only environmentally-friendly projects, focusing on the three categories of art, community and technology. The collective mission is to create a positive impact on our environment by driving changes in the way we live towards a more sustainable future.

In a global society that has myopically exploited our natural resources for short-term profit, crowdfunding can be the space where it is possible to find the balance between respecting the earth and our insatiable curiosity for innovation and progress.