“Every woman in this room is powerful and every man in this room is powerful too,” Jessica Jackley says in a keynote at the One Young World Summit 2012, “[and] we have to be careful because sometimes that power goes unused.” This is especially true, she says, if you don’t believe in yourself and don’t believe in the potential of others. As the co-founder of the micro-loaning website KIVA explains, you can have the best ideas and tools at your disposal—but none of that matters in you don’t believe that you have the potential to make a change.

Social entrepreneur speaker Jessica Jackley has recently been named as a 2012 Buick Agent of Change for her role as the co-founder of peer-to-peer microlending site KIVA. “Simple ideas are often overlooked,” she says, and the toughest barrier to overcome is collectively believing that more is possible and that even the smallest idea can make the world a better place. 

(Source: youtube.com)

Here’s Jessica Jackley, KIVA co-founder and Lavin speaker, talking with The Economist about the future of crowdfunding and community entrepreneurship.

Here’s a preview of Reza Aslan (founder of Aslan Media) and Jessica Jackley’s (co-founder of KIVA) new talk, The Promise and Perils of Social Media:

Reza Aslan and Jessica Jackley know all about the social web’s remarkable ability to build communities and incite social change. As the founder of Aslan Media, which is altering perceptions of the Arab world through traditional and online entertainment, Aslan has traced the impact of social media in the Middle East. As the co-founder of KIVA, the world’s largest microlending website, Jackley has harnessed the power of one-to-one relationships to triumph over bureaucratic lending models. Together, this husband and wife team explains how social media has irrevocably changed the world, and explores the future of online collaboration. How has social media gone from simple news gathering to revolutionizing the concept of community? What changes must our institutions make—from government to business to education—in order to catch up to our new web-based society? And what can an individual do to ensure that social media reaches its full potential as a force for global change?

An astonishing animated graphic tracing over 4 million KIVA microloans, over five years, as they move from lender to borrower back to lender. Watch the whole world light up! KIVA was co-founded by Lavin keynote speaker Jessica Jackley.