Every day, around 1,500 people in South Africa become infected with HIV. This epidemic has led to about 1.4 million orphans in South Africa alone. Many of these young children are malnourished and are in desperate need of care. Jill Youse, founder of the International Breast Milk Project (IBMP), is here to help.
To date, IBMP has sent 65,000 bottles of breast milk to South Africa. This amount of “liquid gold,” as Youse calls it, has the ability to feed 2,188 babies for a month. If you do the math, it’s easy to see that there’s still a need for milk. Youse and two thousand other mothers are determined to meet this demand.
The idea of donating milk first came to Youse after her daughter was born and she had a freezer full of breast milk. Not wanting the food to go to waste, she turned to Google. Youse soon found an orphanage in South Africa that needed donor milk. After personally sending her milk to Durban, South Africa, Youse had no idea that her actions would turn into an international nonprofit.“I didn’t think, ‘Oh I’m going to go start a nonprofit organization and start a worldwide movement. I just thought, ‘This is a simple solution. I have a whole lot of something, and here’s this baby that has nothing. Certainly this is least I can do,’” says Youse.
