This is an entry to LearnAboutPoverty.org’s Blog Action Day Competition – to win an epic prize of a trip to Sydney to play with Australia’s only Microsoft Surface, learn from Amnesia and Yahoo, and have a tour of Google’s offices. Check out the competition page to find out how to enter.  

We all know that blogs and social networks are very powerful but are you taking advantage of it? I want to highlight two people who are making things happen at the moment: 

Steve Hopkins at World Vision Australia

When Steve saw the message Blog Action Day was spreading he pounced on the opportunity to pair it with the work he is doing at WorldVision. Right now there are 6,424 websites participating on October 15th with a reach of 9,230,964 and after seeing the results of social media with their Teenage affluenza is spreading fast video on YouTube gaining 757,000 views he knows there is massive potential. 

Steve set up LearnAboutPoverty.org to provide bloggers with resources to help them talk about the topic of Poverty, and arranged some amazing prizes to give away in the process. 

Mark Hayward Train for Humanity

Mark Hayward has partnered with some other well-known bloggers to raise money while getting fit with Train For Humanity.

This is made even more impressive because of the fact that Mark lives on the tiny island of Culebra – that’s the power and promise of the internet right? 

I love the way that Mark has leveraged the idea. He was probably wanting to get fit anyway, and he was probably going to donate to Kiva anyway – but by pairing the two objectives he has been able to involve a whole group of people online and produce some great results. 

You’re not the only person trying to further your goal and if you can find those who share your goals the momentum will build and you will get further. 

What am I doing?

The first and simplest thing I am doing is supporting both of these guys. I have tweeted about their projects, I’m writing this post, I made a donation to Mark, and I will promote Steve’s project more over the next few days.

I also have an account at Kiva. I love what they are doing and the fact that my little $50 is having a huge impact to Mushvig the taxi-driver in in the northeasterly Azerbaijani town of Khachmaz. I’m not telling you this to show off, but to show how easy it is participate. If you don’t have a blog or twitter account why not post this page as an item in your Facebook stream?

Kiva are truly doing some amaznig things and your $25 loan (loan means you provide value as well as getting the money back!) can make a huge difference. They deliver a massive amount of capital each week and recently unlocked $10m in extra value with a small change to the investing process. 

Your support is what makes these people’s actions worthwhile and it doesn’t take much to help – it is as simple as blogging or tweeting something that people are doing, or sending an email to your friends. 

What cause are you supporting?

By Ross Hill - October 9th, 2008 at 1:57pm with 2,493 views - kiva mark_hayward steve_hopkins trainforhumanity worldvision