HumanKindMedia

Concerned about our global footprint? Help educate a girl

In an unusual and inspiring conversation hosted by Swissnex last week in San Francisco, Mathis Wackernagel, founder of Global Footprint Network, was not talking about increasing food production, reducing carbon emissions, or lowering consumption. He spent most of the evening talking about co-presenter Ann Cotton's work at The Campaign for Female Education (Camfed) in Africa.

Cotton and Wackernagel came together as part of Swissnex's ongoing program for "connecting the dots" between science, higher education, art and innovation for exchange and collaboration between innovators in Switzerland, the US and other countries.

In this conversation, the two described their first meeting at the Skoll World Forum (both have received Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship). After a chance seating arrangement next to Ann, Wackernagel realized a connection between the outcomes Ann was describing and the goals he was looking at for sustainability. Since then they have been looking at ways to work together to educate leaders, countries, communities, and NGO's about this correlation.

Ann Cotton and Camfed have been HumanKind Media favorites since this interview Liz did with Ann and Camfed graduate Fiona Muchembere. Fiona, you may remember, is now a human rights lawyer, and serves as director of Camfed’s alumnae network of 8,000 African women as well as being a big supporter of those girls herself (she sponsors 22).

Wackernagel is a Swiss native and PhD in community and regional planning from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he created the Ecological Footprint, a science-based sustainability tool that measures how much of the Earth's resources we use, how much we have and who uses what.

In 2003, he and Susan Burns co-created Global Footprint Network with a mission to work with countries and cities, companies and individuals to monitor current ecological resource balances and to plan for the future, with the ultimate goal of reducing humanity's worldwide use back down to a "one planet" footprint. Check out the link to see when we passed the "one planet" mark (meaning we exceeded the Earth's bio-capacity.) You can assess your own footprint if you haven't already, here, or for eye-opening world footprint data click here.

Global Footprint Network aims to make the Ecological Footprint as prominent a metric as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to help countries begin to plan for sustainability. By 2015, through its flagship Ten-In-Ten Campaign, they hope to have ten countries managing their ecological wealth in the same way they manage their finances. To date, the list of countries, companies, NGO's and collaborators is growing and the case stories are impressive.

Last month on their 5th anniversary, GFN released their Africa report which examines the possibilities for managing African resources to advance African goals for ending poverty and disease within a sustainable development model. In spite of the fact that individual Africans' resource consumption is extremely small - in many cases not enough to adequately provide for
themselves and their families - rising population is bringing the region close to its ecological limits, according to Global Footprint Network's report.

Using scientific standards for the footprint to measure a country's bio-capacity combined with the UN's Human Development Index as an indicator of socio-economic development, Wackernagel is an evangelist for female education as a way to ensure Africa’s growth and development within the one-planet sustainability window. He says, "For $2 billion a year, just by investing in girls, you could transform all of Africa. This is one of the best investments we could make to achieve human development goals that can persist in the face of, and even help alleviate, resource constraints."

The pair make a compelling argument for the direct impact of female education on Humanity's Ecological Footprint: Girls who receive an education and can make decisions regarding their lives have a higher likelihood of marrying their peers at an appropriate age; they have fewer and more healthy children, are more likely to positively affect the health and education of their children, and contribute to their communities. They also earn significantly higher income than their peers--15 to 20% more per year of high school education.

As an illustration of this, last year Camfed and its alumae organization, Cama, supported more than 408,000 kids in school, had amassed 2,700 partner schools, and developed 380 community health care workers. The over 8,000 alumnae of the organization are sponsoring schooling of over 25,000 African children themselves.

Among the alums are filmmakers and program managers for Camfed in their countries; there are also assemblywomen, physical therapists, doctors, nurses, human rights lawyers, and business owners. In the UN Chronicle Ann says, "For the Millennium Development Goals to become a reality rather than just a broken promise, the rights—and dreams—of rural girls and women must remain at the forefront of policy planning and strategies. The education of girls and young women—with its dividends of poverty alleviation, gender equality, HIV/AIDS reduction—is the single most effective means by which so many of the problems blocking Africa’s development can be overcome."

In March, Goldman Sachs announced their 10,000 Women initiative which includes a partnership with Camfed to provide rural girls with post high school education in business, financial management, and entrepreneurship in a "summer school" program beginning in December.

Today, in my 29-Day Giving Challenge Day 3, Round 2, I added my support of a Camfed high school student, which I can now see not only as an investment in a girl's future, but in the future of a continent and a planet, too. Not bad.

You can help a woman heal the world by donating here. You can contribute to the important work Global Footprint Network is doing around the globe here.

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Community

Some of our friends have huge extended families, from full compliments of grandparents, aunts and uncles, to swarms of cousins, in-laws and people to whom they know they're related, but don't know exactly how. When a big event comes up for our family, I feel particularly wistful for my kids who have a total of 7 of us family members that we can conjure up to celebrate (and that involves lots of miles and airfare). So, for my son's graduation, I did what I always do. I called upon the "relatives" we've germinated the past 20+ years-- the friends we've made from babies through high school, our neighbors who have watched us grow as a family, the teachers we have loved, and dear friends we made through our kids along the way.

When we were all in a room together last week, celebrating my son for his graduation, I realized what community means, in the deepest way I have ever understood it. It's how we honor our collective past, how we create possibilities for the future, how we send our kids off, how we help each other grow, and how we support one another beyond the family unit.

When I was writing about sustainability, I watched the film, The End of Suburbia, an alarming but informative look at post-oil America, which was an eye-opener for me. After the End of Suburbia I fretted for a few weeks until I noticed what communities do when they need to: Iowa, New Orleans, China, Indonesia. Now, I see strong communities as an even more important link in our survival and evolution.

All along at HumanKind Media, we've been looking at communities--local, international, on-line and on the front lines--for what they offer for healing the world. From the Millennium Villages to the U.S. community Braden's building for a school community in Zimbabwe, from Cami's and Nipun's giving communities, to Dave Egger's pirate supply grassroots education community, I have seen what's possible when people come together around a common bond.

In 1993, John Kretzmann and John McKnight's groundbreaking study of communities, Building Communities from the Inside Out, A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, proposed a move from focusing on a "community" or region's problems (the deficiency model) and focusing instead on developing and using the unique skills, and assets of the community members (the asset-based community model).

I have been appreciating the on-line communities I belong to more because of the assets people bring--the vast burgeoning community of new media bloggers, change makers around the world, our 29-Day Giving Challenge group, and especially our little band of HumanKind Media readers. And, I've also been paying attention more to the communities I am physically, locally part of--a neighborhood, a small unincorporated town, a school district, a community of parents and kids of my kids' ages, a coaching community, a meditation community.

In this recent post, I talked about the human universals--commonalities all of us humans on the planet share. Among the human universals are: collective identity, coalitions, reciprocal exchanges, food sharing and gift giving.

I've been actively imagining the community I could live out my post-oil days in, with a community garden, tutoring centers for kids near every school, multi-media library centers, and local music spots for spontaneous jam sessions and concerts that everyone can walk to. I've been thinking of that asset-based model, where everyone contributes their own unique skills and assets, and the whole is better than the sum of its parts.

I have some plans for the next few months to explore communities around the world that are creating and building new possibilities for a future worth passing on. As you can tell by the delays in my recent posts, I can use all the help I can get. If you have ideas for posts on cool communities, please e-mail me or leave a comment. Stay tuned.

Cami's response to difficulty: give

I've always found great wisdom in the counsel that you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to what happens to you. In development circles, they call this response-able, able to respond with grace and ease. In the mainstream media these are usually heroes--people who respond in ways that are heroic.

The great mainstream example of responding with grace and ease these days is Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor, Imagineer beyond the Disney sense, and the man who has given us the Last Lecture. He has inspired millions with the video, his book, and his continued show of courage in the face of pancreatic cancer. Though I'm inspired and moved by Randy's Pausch, I also believe there are millions of untold stories of equally inspirational people who respond to difficulty in equally powerful ways that we don't get to see on the front page or in prime time.

Lately the person I'm most amazed about is Cami Walker. In March, during "dark days" Cami took out an old journal and read what Mbali Creazzo, spiritual guide and leader of her women's circle, had suggested months back: "Give something away for 29 days." Cami decided right then that 29 days of giving, focusing on others, might be just the thing to help shift the weight of her problems. I'd tell her story here, but I'd really like you to visit her 29 Gifts site and read it yourself--it's inspiring.

Thus began a journey that she has turned into a movement in a few short months. When I signed up on June 1 as part of HumanKind Challenge #4, I was #340-something. At last count today, the giving community (the ones who have signed up to be counted) is at 486 and growing. I haven't counted the countries but I know there are some 29-day givers from the UK, Canada, Japan and the US. Though the majority of members up until now are mostly women, Cami knows men to be very giving and she's looking for more to join the challenge.

I talked to Cami last week the day before she completed her third round of the 29 Days. You can see the photojournal of her latest "29th Day" here. She said that though the Challenge was not her first experience with giving (her mother is a philantrhopist at heart), it has been the most dramatic. She is amazed at what she has received, tangible and intangible, as a result of something so simple.

I'm guessing there's no question that you already give every day. The 29-Day Challenge just invites you to check out what happens when you do a giving "project" for 29-days, where you've shifted your intention to search out new opportunities, and when you do it as part of a world-wide giving community.

I hope you'll watch Cami's video and read her story. If you haven't joined her 29-Day Giving Challenge yet, click here now. It's never too late to start your own 29-Day challenge. You can read stories from the giving community where people have submitted the mundane and the miraculous for inspiration and new ways to think about generosity. And, after you've joined the 29-day challenge, add yourself to our HumanKind Group if you'd like.

If you like imagining a world where giving is the default shared intention everywhere, pass this along (to the guys, too). I don't think Cami will have trouble getting to her goal of 2,000. Her response to her life's challenges was to give a gift that I and others are now receiving--a reminder to hold generosity in our hearts and minds when we wake every day. If I could have my wish, she would get to 20,000,000+ in the next year or two, changing the world one small gift at a time.