Kiva, deveop into a "fourth sector" organization

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It doesn't sound like Kiva is having these problems, but I thought I might bring up an idea. I've been working with and watching non-profits for a long time. After many years of dealing with the side effects of organizations run off donations - no raises, few benefits, chronic labor and material shortages, and donor politics - I've decided that non-profit financing doesn't help produce organizations built for long-term issues. Instead I think a very promising approach is to build "fourth sector" organizations - organizations that have both for-profit and non-profit missions. There's nothing wrong with producing a product that people want to pay for, and nothing wrong with tackling issues that nobody wants to pay for.  The higher good would be to use the profit side to produce sustainable yields for the non-profit side. Of course, due to federal tax law you would need to create two different organizations, which is not easy.

One idea that I thought of is basically a direct translation of Kiva for American small businesses. Why couldn't there be a peer to peer public venture capital firm? If you've ever tried to start a business, you know how hard it is to find financing. The most available financing besides your savings account is debt based financing. Loans are also hard to grow a small business on because it often takes time to become profitable. The problem with the existing venture capital groups is that they're run by very rich guys who have low risk tolerance and want to double their money in as short a period of time as possible. What this Kiva-sibling organization would do is post business plans, run the website for investors to use, and administer the resulting capital. The financing could be equity based financing - say selling private or limited shares of the small business for a small handling fee.  Once the money is recieved it is not just doled out to the business, but fed to it in an accountable way.

As Kiva has noticed, the public is a lot more risk tolerant than institutional or big money investors. If I buy a $25 share of a start-up blimp air cargo company (yes, it really does exist) and it goes belly up, big deal. If it succeeds then I could end up with a great return. If the blimp company stays small, then that's okay with me too. I really like seeing people's ideas and it would be neat to help interesting ideas get started. On the Kiva side, then there is a long-term, sustainable source of financing.