The giving Back Awards: 15 People Who Make America Great

The rest goes to nonprofits such as KaBOOM!, which organizes communities to build their own playgrounds, and Modest Needs, a group that channels small amounts of money to help poor working families who've been hit by unexpected expenses. Recipients of the gifts often become donors when they are back on their feet. Omidyar says his philanthropic approach is motivated by the lessons of eBay, which helped millions of ordinary people become entrepreneurs. The stories that move Omidyar inevitably involve ordinary people discovering their own power: a grandmother who talked a local store into feeding volunteers who built a playground in her housing project; a mother in the Dominican Republic who used a $68 loan to open a fruit stand and cleared enough in profit to send her children to school.

Omidyar's greatest passion is microfinance, the practice of making loans as small as $40 to entrepreneurs in developing countries. "It's not about alleviating poverty through charity," he says. "It's about giving someone the tools they need to make their own life successful, actually trusting them with something they might not have been allowed to touch before, which is money." He has given millions to the Grameen Bank, a leading private microfinance lender. And last year he and Pam gave $100 million to Tufts University, their alma mater, to establish a microfinance investment fund. Omidyar hopes this project will prove to other institutional investors that microfinance is a smart way to earn high returns. And these are small-scale tools available to everyone, not just dot-com billionaires. "Business can be a force for good," he says. "You can make the world a better place and make money at the same time." It's a lesson Omidyar has learned well--and one he wants to share.

—Karen Breslau

3 - The Pioneer

Randy Rusk
Wet Mountain Valley, Colo.

A conservative rancher stands up for his land by forging an unlikely alliance.