Why Congo Matters (Part I of II)

Why Congo Matters from Emily Troutman on Vimeo.

After spending a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I find myself speaking most often about the numbers: 5.4 million dead, 2,000 rapes per month, 17,000 UN soldiers, a war that started 15 years ago (or more?).

And suddenly, the conflict seems impossibly huge, unsolvable, tragic and remote. It is easy to forget that numbers are symbols, representing real people who take up an actual, physical space; who walk the down the dirt roads at sunset and carry water from the river, just as they did when I was there.

Numbers are a simple way to measure what has been lost. But we also lose something in the counting. We begin to think we know the exact dimensions of a problem, and then we file it away to be solved later, somewhere between running out of milk and global warming.

For a number to be useful, it should have a beating heart and a face. It should collect names and remind us of something in ourselves. A number should challenge us to unravel it, to give it a smell (the earthy jungle undergrowth), a color (the black volcanic dust), a taste (papaya), and a sound (the “snap” of a green bean).

Each death, each rape in Congo, happens in a moment when the sun is either up or down, when the rain has started or stopped, when a small phrase was uttered, or a glance exchanged. The numbers can tell us something about how often it has happened, but almost nothing about how. Or who.

With a story this big, and so little public awareness of it, I started to ask myself, “Does Congo matter?” I don't know. I guess that's hard to measure. It matters to the people who live there. It matters to me.

The statistics used in this video can be found in the following reports:

UNICEF – Country Statistics
International Rescue Committee – Mortality in the DRC, An Ongoing Crisis
International Committee of the Red Cross – Survey on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Civilians

Emily’s Photography
Emily’s blog, Who We Are / How We Live

NEED on KFAI Radio

NEED co-founder Kelly Kinnunen was featured on Twin Cities radio station KFAI on August 18 at 8 AM to talk about NEED’s upcoming music festival. Interviewed by Pam Hill Kroyer, Kelly described plans for the event, who it will benefit, and how listeners could get involved. This was a great opportunity for NEED to get the word out about the Street Music for Street Kids benefit concert, which will be held in Minneapolis at Peavey Plaza on August 20 from 6 to 8 PM. Kelly told the KFAI audience about the struggle plaguing the street children of Jakarta, and of the hope that the event’s beneficiary, the Nurani Insani School for Street Children in Jakarta, strengthens in them.

Listen to the program on KFAI website

Women Weave a Brighter Living

Posted by Kyra Gibson in Organizations Edit


Photo | Kyra Gibson

As any hardworking Nepali knows, if you want something you have to fight for it. With over 80% of the population living a less than $2 a day in Nepal, nothing is easy. Women in the picturesque city of Pokhara, Nepal are taking matters into their own hands. They work 12 hours a day creating beautiful handbags to sell in the market.

Home to Generations

Posted by Bronson Enriquez in NEED Magazine, Uncategorized Edit

Photos | Bronson Enriquez

I traveled to Haiti with regular contributor Paul Corbit Brown to shoot a story for the magazine. We were flying into the capitol city of Port au Prince, and spending the first night at a boy’s home. I figured it would be a guest house behind an orphanage or something. Just a place to sleep before heading north to Gonaives, where the organization we were covering helps people affected by Hurricane Gustav.

I didn’t expect the beautiful home we found on arrival. The building itself is gorgeous, and all of the walls inside are decorated with fantastic artwork. A miscommunication regarding travel arrangements resulted in our spending two extra days there. Despite the time crunch this created, I am grateful for the opportunity to get to know more about this wonderful place.

Photographer Jonathan Alpeyrie experiences Georgia conflict

Photographer Jonathan Alpeyrie

The upcoming issue of NEED magazine will feature a story about life-saving aid being given to those displaced by conflict in Georgia. Jonathan Alpeyrie, a war photographer whose photos will be featured in the story, describes one of his experiences photographing in the midst of this conflict.


“Life is often a series of events best described by luck, or a lack thereof. As a war photographer who has seen much pain and human suffering, I am very attached to luck, because no one outlives a thousand fateful events. During the Russian offensive in Georgia last August, I realized how much my understanding of life and luck are bound together.

While riding in my Georgian friend’s car during the Russian bombing, I was looking for a story to tell through my photographs. South Ossetian raiders roamed the streets of Gori in search of revenge and loot. After hearing bomb blasts, Jimmy and I turned a corner to take a more hidden route.

The narrow street led us to a chain of small houses, most of them abandoned by owners who had fled the city. We drove past a larger home with a garage and I asked my friend to stop the car because I could hear people crying. I looked into the garage and saw a family, mostly men, in tears.



We talked with them and found out that the grandfather had just died from wounds suffered during the Russian bombings that day. The family noticed my camera and wanted to make sure others would see what the Russians have done to them. They brought me upstairs to a room where the body of an elderly man rested inside a wooden coffin surrounded by traditional drapery. On both sides of the coffin, women of the family cried in desperation, regretting the violent death of a man whose life should have ended peacefully.

BEYOND CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Posted by Michael Duffield in Organizations Edit


President of Prison Fellowship International, Ron Nikkel

Nepal: As president of Prison Fellowship International, Ron Nikkel treks to towns accessible only by foot. Outside one prison, he says, “I saw an inmate reaching his hands through the bars, and either giving or receiving something from a little girl in the streets. I thought, gee, that was odd, and I thought probably it was a kid bringing food to an inmate. But once I got inside I was approached by an inmate begging for help: ‘My daughters are in the street, I have been in prison for two years. My wife has left me, my two daughters are living in the street.’ He was giving his daughter a handful of rice to keep her alive.” Today, PFI runs a program offering housing and education to homeless children of prisoners in Nepal.

Australia: Nikkel met with sex offenders and victims who had participated in a PFI reconciliation program in which they told each other their stories. The victims told him of healing obtained from hearing the prisoners’ stories. The effect was even more profound for the offenders. Nikkel relates that one said, “Before, I’d get up in the morning, look in the mirror, feeling sorry for myself, and all I could see in the mirror was myself. Now when I get up in the morning and look in the mirror, I see my victim, and I weep.” He no longer saw his victim as a source of gratification, but as a living, breathing, feeling human being. Even the prisoner saw this as a change for the better.

Ana’s Playground helps kids choose play over war

photos | Andy Richter

Dave Weiberg carried a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher (RPG) into an elevator at Minneapolis’ Riverside Plaza. A young man who stood beside him asked, “Is that real?” Dave quickly said no and explained that the gun was a prop for the film Ana’s Playground. The young man smiled and said, “Well it looks great, it looks just like the one I used to shoot when I was a boy.” He told Dave that he had been a child solider in the conflict in Somalia.

The cast and crew of Ana’s Playground were amazed by this coincidence. They were creating a film about children in armed conflict in a neighborhood that had experienced it first-hand.

The idea to make a short film about children in conflict came to Eric Howell after he read a novel about snipers in Sarajevo. Knowing that there was already a lot of information available about the topic, Eric wanted to make something different. He created a film set in an indefinite location, without language or a specific culture.

SAVIORS FOR UNACCOMPANIED REFUGEE CHILDREN

Posted by Jen Rose in Organizations Edit



Heshima Kenya, the first organization devoted to empowering unaccompanied refugee minors (UAMs) living in Nairobi, was co-founded by Talyn Good and my friend Anne Sweeney. I first met Anne at Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre in July of 2003. Anne was on her way back to the States from Nairobi, where she worked with an agency that assisted refugees to process for resettlement to a third country. Anne struck me as full of passion, possessing a sharp wit and a radiant smile. We became fast friends. She often told me about urban refugees living in the slums of Nairobi. She railed against the lack of protection for the most vulnerable of the urban refugees: women and, especially, separated and or orphaned children. Social services didn't reach this population traumatized by war, forced displacement and abuse.

A few years later Anne and I were both living in DC. I had completed my master's degree and was working in refugee resettlement and Anne was working on her own master's degree. She had recently returned to Nairobi to study Swahili and reconnected with Talyn Good, a friend and former colleague. Talyn was as passionate as Anne about urban refugee children. These women decided to use their experience in refugee-related work to form a nonprofit dedicated to providing comprehensive social services to UAMs. In May 2007, Anne and Talyn co-founded Heshima Kenya as a registered NGO based in Nairobi and a US nonprofit. “Heshima” is the Swahili word for respect, honor and dignity.

GEORGIA: we were moved to help

Posted by Johanna Holtan in Organizations Edit



I am a returned Peace Corps volunteer was evacuated from my placement in Georgia last August due to Russian attacks. After Peace Corps released its volunteers, a group of us returned to Georgia to help. Since we have been back, we have witnessed the struggle and resiliency of many Georgian people, such as Sophio Khubulashvili.

Until the conflict threatened to take everything away, Sophio was one of the brightest and hardest working students in Georgia. She was a member of Gori University’s student government and various faculty advisory boards. She participated in programs sponsored by the Model UN and taught piano in her spare time.

Like many Georgians, Sophio's family depends on agriculture for their livelihood. They lost their harvest during the Russian-Georgian conflict. Without a steady income, Sophio could not afford to return to school and continue pursuing her dream of being a teacher. Thanks to The Gori Regional Education Fund (GREF), Sophio was granted an educational scholarship to get back into the classroom. She told me, "Because of the financial hardship my family doubted that I could continue my study, but with [GREF's] great support, I can."

Building a Village of Peace

Cathi Peterson with students

“We’re all fighting back the tears. … The children thanked us and promised to work hard and do well. This is just the beginning. ... and we aren’t leaving this place behind, we are taking it home with us.” — Steve Cooper

Steve Cooper traveled to eastern Rwanda with a team of co-workers this December. The group’s main assignment? To build a wireless infrastructure for a new school about to open and to welcome 125 students. The group doesn’t build networks in developing countries all the time. Their day jobs are with Liquidnet, an electronic exchange firm on Wall Street. But Liquidnet considers itself a different type of Wall Street firm.

To start, the company distinguishes itself by donating 1 percent of its revenue to charity. Brian Walsh, director of global social engagement (GSE) at Liquidnet, explains that founder Steve Merrin wanted to re-imagine a company’s role in philanthropy. “We’re trying to establish a new model,” he says, “one that shows you can be successful while giving back.”

Merrin and the GSE team also wanted to be sure that their giving wasn’t diluted by being dispersed among too many causes. They decided to focus on a single project where they could achieve a measurable social impact.


View of Student Housing

Walsh explains how they chose a project in Rwanda called Agahozo Shalom: “The Rwandan genocide represents the failure of the global community to act, while Agahozo Shalom represents people from around the world uniting to solve a global challenge.” In response to the genocide, an entire village is being created for orphans left behind.

Inspired by communities built in Israel after WWII to house orphans of the Holocaust, the village is an effort of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Built on a 143-acre site overlooking Lake Mugesera, the village will include a school, a medical clinic, a library and an arts center. The community will strive to provide a nurturing environment where children can recover from the trauma of the genocide — and also an enriching environment that will help the children develop vocational and leadership skills.

Liquidnet has committed to a “robust partnership” with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, says Walsh. Besides substantial financial resources, Liquidnet supports the project through strategic planning, website building, budgeting and forecasting, supply drives and technology infrastructure. In addition, more than 20 employees have traveled to Rwanda to provide on-the-ground support and to witness the project firsthand. By the looks of the employee blog, the trips have been powerful experiences for all involved.

“I want to let you know this trip is the best gift I have ever got in my life,” wrote Liquidnet employee Zheng Xu on the blog, “the privilege of giving our warm hearts to the village and being a representative of Liquidnet.”

“But looking at their faces!” wrote Tony Contreras. “So extraordinarily happy to get another chance at life. Every day the kids … seem to be a little bit more comfortable.”

And Cathi Peterson: “The joy that is in each one of the kids was written all over their faces.”

Two weeks ago classes began at Agahozo Shalom, the beginning of an education that will open doors for these children. The same week, the Liquidnet team held a lunch meeting with their colleagues back home to share photos and stories of the village that they have been instrumental in bringing about.

“It’s been a really life-changing experience,” says Walsh. “Everyone wants to be a part of something larger than themselves. To give back and be a part of something really meaningful.”

Agahozo-Shalam
www.agahozo-shalom.org
Liquidnet
www.liquidnet.com
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
www.jdc.org

HELPING IN KOLKATA

Tamrah Schaller O’Neil is volunteering in Kolkata, India, through the organization Pathways to Children. She has agreed to send occasional reports about her experiences.



Kolkata streets are quiet at 5 a.m. but the air is thick with a distinctive scent of coal smoke, diesel and spices. Five of us are travelling with Pathways to Children, which facilitates extraordinary volunteer experiences. We drive to Mercy Hospital to see where they cook the rice and lentil mixture that feeds 25,000 people daily. Men load huge food-filled steel caldrons into a truck and we follow in a car. Women and children are lined up with steel bowls at established points on the road to receive their only meal of the day. Men unload the giant pots and one or two female village leaders step up to distribute the rice. Family representatives carry cards stating the number of their family members in order to get the appropriate amount of food.

Our leader today is Amitabh Singh, donor relations manager of Children Need Love, an affiliate of Mercy Hospital. Singh says that most residents of the city have no idea these people exist. We hand out food, mostly to children, and take their pictures as they eat. Their smiles nourish us as they enjoy the attention of our cameras and admire their own images in the digital viewfinder. As the sun rises, we reach the last stop where the remaining food is emptied into children’s bowls. Then we retrace our route to pick up the empty pots and return them to the hospital to be refilled for the following day, and the day after that.

Our next stop is the school for the blind. We take a tour and observe students learning their lessons. There are 135 children here aged two to 20 years, and all were rescued off the street. Mercy Hospital pays their tuition. We had planned to reorganize their Braille library, but because the windows have no glass, dust perpetually blows in. We discuss the library’s needs, which range from capital improvements to tapes to record books and lessons for the students to listen to.

After lunch we head to Mother Teresa’s. Except for the sign that says “Mother’s House” and the nuns wearing distinctive white and blue trim habits, you would never know that so many receive care within these shabby walls. The nuns have a very set registration protocol for volunteers. We are assigned the afternoon shift of the young handicapped and will be able to return tomorrow to help.

For dinner we have a special invitation. A friend in Minneapolis has notified her best friend Jyoti in Kolkata that the five of us from Pathways to Children are in town, and Jyoti invites us all to her home. What an honor to have a dinner in a private home. She is a board member of Society for Indian Children Welfare. Its founder, Dr. Z.P. Dadina, comes to pick us up. The organization does amazing volunteer work, much like Mother Teresa’s, with an orphanage for special needs children. The other members of the all-women board join us for dinner. In addition, we meet Monica and Maria, who work on adoptions for special needs children from India through Adoptions Centrum in Sweden. Most of the women dress in non-traditional Indian clothing, no saris, but the meal was traditionally spicy Indian. The amazing cuisine can’t compare with the company of so many inspiring, highly educated women dedicated to helping the children of India.

Pathways to Children
www.childrenshomeadopt.org/Pathways_to_Children.html
Children Need Love
www.childrenneedlove.org
Mother Theresa of Calcutta Center
www.motherteresa.org
Society for Indian Children Welfare, Dr. Z.P. Dadina
dr.dadina@vsnl.net

The Giving Trip

Posted by Jan Hanson

In early January 2007, I boarded an early morning flight from Minneapolis. While boarding the plane bound for Lima, a woman asked in broken English where I was going. I told her I was serving as an international volunteer in Ayacucho, Peru. She said, “It’s very poor there.” That is precisely why I chose to spend two weeks working with orphans in Ayacucho, and it was a trip of a lifetime.

My volunteer work with children in Peru was simple. It involved being taken by the hand of a small boy and sitting close on the dirt playground while we wrote our names and English words in his school notebook and read them out loud. I spent other days cutting out paper dolls for amazed eight year olds at a girls orphanage, reading Mi Papa es un Gigante to toddlers, teaching basic English to teenagers and even piling 20-30 pound blocks to build a fence around a school so children could have a safe place to play. True joy filled my heart as I thought about the joy these simple gestures would bring to children.

That experience galvanized a passion inside me. I realized that my professional career of marketing financial services for a nationwide banking company was no longer satisfying. Instead, spending my life and talents doing something to make the lives of orphans and poor children just a little bit brighter was what I was built to do.

Months after volunteering in Peru, I began to shape a plan for a nonprofit called 200 Orphanages Worldwide Inc. I built a web-based nonprofit that would serve as a forum for existing organizations worldwide to raise awareness and funds for building projects that serve orphans.

MENDING THE HEART OF A COBBLER'S DAUGHTER

Kadeeja’s family lives in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. They are shoemakers, weavers of “klash,” a handmade shoe common in the region. They sell their shoes at the local market, and some are bought by Preemptive Love. This organization sells the klash on its website to consumers across the world, and uses the money generated to fund heart surgeries for Iraqi children. A relative of Kadeeja’s approached a Preemptive Love staff member in the market to say that there was child in his family who was in desperate need of heart surgery. Could they help Kadeeja?

Kadeeja was sixteen years old when her relative spoke with Preemptive Love, and the defects in her heart were taking a toll on her life. She was exhausted by any exertion and limited in what she could do. Furthermore, pulmonary hypertension, the over-working of her heart, threatened to bring her life to an early end.

Preemptive Love agreed to take on Kadeeja’s case. This meant finding funding to pay for the surgery and related care, as well as for travel to a country where the surgery could be performed. It also meant arranging the surgery, aftercare, visas, transport and accommodation. She was a high-risk patient who had in fact been previously turned down for surgery. Nonetheless, Preemptive Love managed to arrange for Kadeeja’s treatment with a hospital in Turkey. And so, with all the excitement of a 16 year-old leaving her home country for the first time, Kadeeja set off in mid January, 2009. The surgery was a complete success, and on February 2, 2009, she returned home healthy and ready to begin a new life unrestrained by illness.

A major source of funding for Preemptive Love is the shoes made by Kadeeja’s family and other families like hers in northern Iraq. The organization buys shoes at the local markets, paying fair market price, then sells them on its website to buyers overseas through Buy Shoes. Save Lives . One hundred percent of the profits from the shoe sales go toward Preemptive Love’s heart program. This system has the additional benefit of opening markets to the shoemakers that would otherwise be unavailable, resulting in higher incomes for them and their families.

Saving lives by repairing hearts is the core of Preemptive Love’s mission. There are, however, other advantages to the organization’s work. Successfully transporting a child to another country for major surgery requires a great deal of cooperation from a great number of people. With Preemptive Love’s work, this cooperation often occurs across divisions that are commonly regarded as insuperable barriers. The Kurdish people have been at odds with Turkey for years, yet Kadeeja, a Kurdish child, was saved by Turkish doctors. Preemptive Love has funded surgeries for Iraqi children in Israeli hospitals, allowing Jewish doctors to save Muslim children. Americans, Iraqis, Israelis, and Turks end up being simply people, not adversaries, working together to save lives. Given the long history of conflict in the region and the recent wars, anything that encourages cooperation and minimizes divisions is a blessing. When these actions save children’s lives it is a true gift indeed.

Preemptive Love
preemptivelove.org

CONSTRUCTING A CHILDHOOD FROM THE GROUND UP

Posted by Rhea Datta in Organizations Edit



Mumbai is a vast and vibrant city, whose destitute underbelly was made famous by Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. The plight of Mumbai’s slum children is not a celluloid myth. As the need for development in a city of 22 million increases, so does the demand for migrant workers and construction laborers. As people pour into the city for such transient work, makeshift dwellings emerge around construction sites, only to be torn down and rebuilt elsewhere after the work ends. The children of these workers have a fairly rootless existence, using rubble-strewn construction sites as their homes and playgrounds. They are invisible to the local government and have little access to healthcare and education.

In 1969 Meera Mahadevan founded Mobile Crèches in Delhi with the belief that every child has rights to a secure environment, education and health services. Three decades later, the organization has reached out to half a million children on construction sites in Mumbai alone. The NGO has three separate faces: Mobile Crèches (Delhi), Mumbai Mobile Crèches (MMC) and Tara Mobile Crèches (Pune), each of which has multiple centers for early childhood development.

Devika Mahadevan is the current CEO of the organization. She is continuing her grandmother’s efforts in Mumbai, where Mobile Crèches has 22 MMC centers and 120 teachers. It relies on support from builders and developers, and petitions the local government to include the children in their mandate. “While we have grown in strength and numbers, the root problem hasn’t changed. Government policies have not changed. Maharashtra [the state where MMC is based] only ratified the Construction Worker Act of 1996 [providing health insurance to workers] last year- which is yet to be implemented. It is ironic – the people constructing the future of our cities have no future to speak of,” Mahadevan says.

LIBERIA, SEEN FROM THE SURF

Posted by Michael Duffield in Uncategorized Edit



Sliding Liberia has all the elements of a classic surf film - stunning photography, a great soundtrack and the obligatory scene of surfers loading their boards onto a beat-up car, ready to head to the waves. But then there are the machine guns, the trash heaps, the bombed-out buildings. There are tales of people fleeing a rebel army through the jungle, of children surviving on a diet of leaves when food ran out, of relatives killed or lost.

The creators of Sliding Liberia have done a masterful job using a surf film lens to give us a behind-the-headlines look at Liberia. It doesn’t offer in-depth investigations or political analysis, and is by no means a detailed profile of the country. Instead it allows the starring surfers, and the cameras that follow them, to look and listen, and to be aware of the country surrounding them and the people who live there. The result is series of vignettes that convey a sense of what it is like to have your country descend into ruin, and of how long and difficult the journey is on the road to recovery.

Among the stories told is that of Dorothy Schellart, who runs a school for orphaned children. Typical of the interviewees, she betrays little despair over her situation. She maintains a hopeful, determined attitude despite her role as leader of a school filled with parentless children who were forced to personally witness war’s full horror. She works through an organization called The Good Samaritan Fellowship Inc. based in Monrovia.

A DAY IN SERAMPORE

Tamrah Schaller O’Neil can be contacted directly regarding Pathways to Children.



Our day starts at 5:15 a.m. when we head over to “Mother House” to go to mass. We leave our shoes at the door. The nuns sit on the floor in prayer or reading their bible while we wait for the priests to enter and lead 6 a.m. mass. A crow outside the open window interrupts my thoughts with its relentless call. During the homily, horns drown out the voice of the priest from time to time. It is a good sermon nonetheless. We head back to the hotel for breakfast in the traffic which is packed with trucks, buses, rickshaws, mini-taxi’s called autos, bikes, dogs, goats and many pedestrians.

Wall of manureAfter breakfast we drive to a small village called Serampore. I try not to pay attention to passing cars because our life seems to be in jeopardy every few minutes. I have prayed a lot while in Kolkata. We arrive safely, and walk to the school we are going to visit. We pass a home where one wall is made of manure patties – probably very insulating and free but it doesn’t have a great perfume.

We enter the school and are greeted with flowers from the children. This is a Calcutta Mercy Hospital-sponsored school called “Monimala: childcare and non-formal education and counseling center for underprivileged children.” It has three classrooms for sixty or so students ages 2-17. They teach English and Bengali and also teach the older students vocational skills such as sewing, knitting and computers. We are entertained by children’s songs and clapping.

NEED | FROM THE EDITOR

“More magazines and other forms of media should focus on the positive as much as NEED does – I think the world would be a better place.”

The problems of poverty, natural disaster, war, social injustice and human suffering around the globe seem too immense for any one person to have an impact. I always thought that I needed unlimited resources to make the world a better place. Believing this prevented me from acting at all. Not long ago, I realized that my inaction was nonsensical. By simply focusing on what I can do, rather than on what I can’t, potential ways to help became visible. Here are four simple things we can all do.

GROCERY STORE
Each time you go to the grocery store, buy kids’ fruit snacks and healthy treats to put into the store’s food shelf donation box. If your grocery store does not have a donation box, talk to the manager to get one there. You can’t image the joy that a child gets from these simple treats. Also think about purchasing items that do not require perishable ingredients. It is a sad realization when there is peanut butter but no bread, or macaroni and cheese but no milk.

YOUR OWN CLOSET
Go through your closets looking for items that are in good shape that you no longer use. You can donate these goods to a nonprofit like Goodwill or The Salvation Army, or to shelters in your area.

WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Host a dinner party and tell your friends and family about a nonprofit that you are passionate about. Word of mouth is the best marketing tool for any business!

GIVING GIFTS
Buy gifts that are “BOGO” (Buy one – Get one), like Tom’s Shoes or the BoGo SunLight Solar flashlight. This way, you can give a gift to someone, and then the company gives the same item to someone in poverty. Purchase fair trade items from an organization like Ten Thousand Villages or Fair Indigo. Take a few extra minutes to search for products that benefit others — the time you spend will be worth it!

Sometimes they are hard to see, but opportunities to make a difference are never far away. All we have to do is look.

Spread Hope,
Stephanie Kinnunen
Editor in Chief and Co-Founder

BREAKING THE POVERTY CYCLE IN MEXICO

Posted by Trevor Snapp



One decade ago, a third of Mexicans’ earnings were poverty line. Most of the poor lived in rural villages surviving on seasonal work and small crops of corn and beans. They received little help from the state, and had few opportunities to change their lot. Hardships pushed many to make the dangerous trip north to the US. Corruption, illiteracy and a lack of rural infrastructure threatened to keep these people poor forever.





But Mexico is a country where anything is possible, from horrific violence to beatific acts of generosity. On Monday the apocalypse looms large, by Wednesday revolution is imminent, and Friday is fiesta.

In this context the world's most spectacularly successful anti-poverty program was born. Oportunidades, originally named PROGRESA, was launched in 1996 as a quiet experiment by then Finance Ministry undersecretary Santiago Levy in the state of Compeche. The program’s premise is simple: pay poor mothers to keep their children in school and take their families to the health clinic.

Its results were astounding. In a slowly growing economy poverty dropped by 17%, and school attendance shot up 85%. Money went directly from the federal government to the families, thus skirting corrupt local officials. Today 25% of the country’s population is enrolled in the $3.8 billion program. It is still too soon to say how the program has affected a generation of poor students. In the next few months results of a decade-long survey on the program’s effects will be finished.

Yet to countries struggling to escape the same cycle of poverty that trapped generations of Mexicans, Oportunidades offers an example. The program is being adapted throughout the world. New York City has launched a similar program Opportunity NYC. Other countries that have instituted similar conditional cash transfer programs include Nicaragua, Brazil, Honduras, Jamaica, Chile, Malawi and Zambia. And organizations like the World Bank are promoting the project around the world. The idea’s expansion is as exciting as the success of the program itself.





More of Trevor Snapp’s
writing and photography

MAKING USE OF THOSE LAST FEW DOLLARS ON GIFT CARDS

Posted by Sudhin Shah

Did you know that the gift card industry generates around $45 billion in revenue? And that at least 10% of cards go unused? Andre and Jeff Shinabarger discussed this with Heather and Jason Locy over dinner one night and they came up with an idea: Why not collect unused gift cards for distribution to those in need? Fundraising began immediately and they left the party with over $50 in unused gift cards.

I probably have a few unused gift cards myself, and like many, I’ve often thrown away the last few dollars because I couldn’t figure out how to spend it. Gift Card Giver is here to help. It collects these unused dollars and distributes them to those in need. It has already donated over $10,000 worth of gift cards. Charities such as Laundry Love, Disaster Relief Project, Essential 2 Life, and Prison Entrepreneurship Program receive its support.

Most donations, however, are made directly to individuals and families. For example, last Christmas when the home of a mother and her five children was broken into and all their Christmas gifts were stolen, Gift Card Giver used $500 in gift card dollars to buy them gifts, clothes and groceries. Stories like this are included on its website to inspire people to contribute their gift cards.

Gift Card Giver’s grassroots campaign has mobilized thousands to donate. Prompted by the dinner when the Shinabargers and Locys first collected gift cards for donation, many donors host and attend House Parties to bring in others. Penny by penny, dollar by dollar, Gift Card Giver is making a difference.

Gift Card Giver

Sudhin Shah's writing can also be seen on her blog Giving Back.

Child Addiction

This post was submitted by photographer Nathan Golden



Street children living at the Howrah Railway Station near Kolkata, India, take care of themselves and each other in an otherwise uncaring environment. I was moved by their ability to generate a community and to survive. They represent tremendous potential that is wasted and in danger of being lost altogether.