The LifeYears Initiative

Thousands of children could be saved with cheap, simple means. Whether it is vaccination or dirt-cheap treatments for childhood diarrhoea. Yet they still die. Why?

Our belief is that they die because we are not faced everyday with the choice of saving them.

"Charity" is this vague, abstract thing you can donate money to. You can buy a can of Coke, a DVD with Lord of the Rings, or "donate to charity". It's a different kind of thing altogether, and we don't think about it in our everyday lives. Even if we want to donate, where should we send the money? There is so much work involved in just getting an overview of the possible organizations and causes... And how do we know the money won't get lost on the way, or be spent on organizational overhead, or end up in the pockets of corrupt leaders in some foreign dictatorship? And if we actually do end up giving a little money away, then that's it and we can contentedly rest and not have to think about it any more. We've done our good deed - why should we need to do more?

The solution we are working for: Make "LifeYears" a consumer good:

* Give people the ability to "save a life year for $0.50"
* Give them their own account so they can collect "saved life years"
* Provide a host of payment options (through SMS services, on-line credit card, weekly "subscription" to life years, etc.)
* Make it extremely simple to find and understand information on how the money will actually end up saving life-years
* Channel all money to whatever charitable project willing to provide the needed numbers for life-year calculations and willing to commit to third-party auditing of numbers and results.
* Use all the web 2.0 tools to increase involvement ("Compare yourself/your country/your group to others" or "Design a viral marketing image or clip and compete to be voted part of the official LifeYearsInitiative material")
* Give people access to unique "stash" to create social proof (E.g., T-shirts stating that "I've saved 15 000 life years - what's your excuse?" or "$10: To you it's a movie. To him its 20 more years of life!")

What do we need to do? Get the concept up and running in a prototype form so we can test it. Then scale it up as quick as possible if it works. In other words, what we need right now is:

* Help with designing and building a web-application. It needs to be smooth, extremely simple - and allow for stuff like
o channeling of payments
o accumulation of lifeyear-points
o access to "charitable project key info" for participating projects
* Contacts in credible, charitable organizations to identify some first projects to include with project-specific bank account money can be channeled into

More will come as we start moving and see more clearly what we need - but for now: Get in touch and let's get started!