Dominant assurance contracts might be interesting here. It's a mechanism like Kickstarter, but if a project can't reach it's funding goal, the entrepreneur pays something the people who tried to support it. This makes waiting for others to fund a project that would benefit you as a side effect an inferior strategy to joining to fund it yourself. It would also make marketing the project (to the people that would benefit from it, in order for them to fund it) easier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_ass...

Imagine a consultancy that organizes this type of deals. Identify projects worth doing with well defined and easy to reach beneficiaries and offer them this kind of contract. If that's properly done, they would want in and fund it. Then hire someone to execute. Repeat.

Perhaps this would be easier to do with geographically local projects first. Also it seems like the expertise required to organize this type of deals would be very different from the expertise required to execute them when they are funded, hence the separation of jobs. Fortunately, the projects don't have to be very sophisticated, they can be something as simple as a playground in an area that needs one.