You can make a difference by educating yourself about investing. Whether you invest in individual stocks or bonds, real estate, or mutual funds, a strong foundation of investing knowledge is the first step to financial security. Below are a links to my favorite sites for investing knowledge.
The Motley Fool
The Fool's purpose is to educate, amuse, and enrich. This site is has a wealth of investing knowledge focused primarily on stock investing and business news with other educational information about mutual funds and personal finance in general. I am a daily listener to The Fool's podcasts and I am a paid subscriber of two of their newsletters. In addition to their newsletter business, The Fool manages three mutual funds and provides financial advisory services.
Vanguard
Vanguard is a not-for-profit mutual fund company, one of the largest asset managers in the world, that specializes in index mutual funds. Vanguard provides brokerage services for clients and manages mutual funds and ETFs at minimal cost. To my friends whom have not interest in investing I recommend opening a brokerage account with Vanguard and employing the strategy recommended by the legendary Warren Buffett: a portfolio weighted 90 percent in Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund and ten percent in cash.