TOMS Shoes does something easy to describe, and yet the impact of the company’s work is so powerful. As the name suggests, TOMS makes and sells shoes. But the business does more than that. Any time a customer buys a pair of shoes, TOMS gives a pair to a child in need. This sort of business-benevolence is what TOMS calls the One for One movement.

Blake Mycoskie started TOMS after visiting Argentina in 2006 and meeting children there who didn’t own any shoes. Without shoes, Mycoskie realized, the children were more susceptible to injury, disease, and infection. He wanted to help them so he founded TOMS with the vision of giving one new pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased by a customer (one for one). It’s gone pretty well – a year later Mycoskie returned to Argentina with family, friends, and 10,000 pairs of shoes.

Over the past four years, TOMS employees have gone on a lot of “shoe drops” just like the first one. In fact every TOMS employee gets to go on a drop at some point, travelling to one of the twenty countries TOMS serves, and handing out shoes to kids who need them. These are kids who, otherwise, might have suffered cuts and wounds on their feet that would have become infected and eventually debilitating. But now they can live healthier lives. These are children who, without shoes, wouldn’t have been allowed to attend school because of uniform requirements. But now they have more opportunities for education.

The power of TOMS Shoes and its One for One mission is that you can participate simply by buying a pair of shoes. And a lot of people have. To celebrate their one millionth sale this past September, Mycoskie and his friends returned once again to Argentina where they gave away the matching pairs.

Learn more at toms.com

I’m a big fan of Kiva. Kiva is a web site that allows you to make small loans to entrepreneurs in parts of the world that really need your help. For example, I just gave $25 to a man selling food in Palestine. It’s a small amount of money to me, but it goes further there. And when multiple people give, it really adds up.

It’s important to note that this is not a donation in the traditional sense – it’s a loan. So the money will be paid back eventually. And this is the power of Kiva.

You’re familiar with the idea of compounded interest, right? You deposit money into a savings account that earns interest, and as you do so, you gain interest on the interest you’ve already earned. So you can save an amount of money, and that amount will keep working for you. Well, Kiva works similarly in that you can give a small amount of money, and keep that money working.

Let’s take the example of my Palestinian grocer. I loaned $25 to him, and eventually he’ll pay that $25 back. I could ask Kiva to send me a check for that amount, or I could choose to “re-loan” that money. Clearly, re-loaning the money would ensure that it goes much further than it would if I just asked for it back. So I re-loan it to another business in a poverty-stricken part of the world. Now my $25 has helped two businesses. See how it “compounds?” I’m not earning interest exactly, but my small loan is continuing to work.

I’m just beginning to realize the power of this concept. I’ve only given a couple hundred dollars, but it’s turned into more than $700 because I keep re-loaning. Again, this is a small amount of money, but I think it goes a long way to help small businesses that may not have many funding sources. And can you think of a better return on investment?

God calls us to serve the poor, and Kiva is one of many ways you can do that. If you’d like to learn more about Kiva, you can do that here. And if you’d like to see who I’ve loaned to, you can see a list here.