Today, October 15, is Blog Action Day where the bloggers of the world promote a theme for action--this year it's poverty, the creative resolution of which is my most favorite blogging topic. In fact, changemakers in the ending poverty and disease arena, such as Paul Farmer and Jeffrey Sachs, were the original inspiration for my little blog about healing the world. I thought if they and Bono could get governments and people around the globe to imagine and begin the work to end extreme poverty by 2015, well, we humans could probably tackle anything. Over the past year, I've delved into poverty from many angles (scroll the whole list here), but always come back to Millennium Promise and The One Campaign as the most shining examples of what's possible, to inspire, organize, move to action, and achieve results.
I'm embarrassed to say I have still been struggling to understand this whole economic crisis in its entirety (and I'm an MBA). I couldn't read enough to make sense of the bailout of large financial institutions when people were losing their homes, so I thought all would be explained when I attended a lecture by Newt Gingrich and Robert Reisch, each touted by their parties as economic experts. Though the lecture was fascinating and they were both profoundly thoughtful and intelligent, I came away worried that all of the solutions and thoughts they had about the crisis were still based upon what I see as a flawed assumption: continued growth of the economy...ad infinitum.
Simply put, when you look at any sustainable system diagram, the arrows go in a circle; when you look at how we talk about our economy, the arrows always want to point up and off the chart. I couldn't reconcile what I knew from my series exploring sustainability and what I recently learned about our global footprint with how the "experts" were talking about the economy.
After the lecture I came back and decided I would keep searching to try to find something that reconciles this question for me. Then I remembered that little money movie someone had sent me last week to watch that I had forgotten.
Canadian Paul Grignon captures in his simple story-telling what he says he learned in high school: "We were studying logarithmic functions such as interest and it struck me that a money system in which money accrues interest at every turn could only function with exponential growth of the money supply." His film, Money As Debt, is to this question of building a sustainable economy as the Story of Stuff is to the question of consumption of our resources. I hope this film makes it around the world twice or more. I can't believe how much I did not understand about our system of money.
Though its longer than most films, I encourage you to watch--it's worth every minute. If you don't know the history of money and banking, or can't imagine how we'll get to the place where there is more equity in who has and who has not, take a look at Money as Debt. And, share it.
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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It seems like yesterday but it was five months ago we began looking at the world's most impossible problems, and began meeting the people who were tackling them. We started with what seemed nearly as unattainable as world peace, the end of extreme poverty around the globe. We wrote this post about Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Goals, an initiative set by the UN in 2000.
Recently Liz got to talk to Karen Schmidt about the Millennium Village project in Mayange sector of Rwanda. Karen is deputy director for Access Project and Millennium Villages Rwanda, at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development (that's through the Earth Institute at Columbia University).
In 2005, Rwanda became the third of 10 sub-Saharan African countries to participate in the Millennium Villages project, meant to demonstrate that empowered communities can lift themselves out of extreme poverty within five years. The Rwandan government chose the first site, in Mayange sector, one of the poorest in the country, struggling not just with past violence but with drought and a small harvest.
Ex-pat aid workers got the program off the ground in 2006, but the projects are now run mostly by Rwandans, including a health care center that went from seeing very few patients to serving thousands. Recently, the Rwandan government announced that each of its 30 districts would implement the Millennium Villages model in their poorest sectors.
Millennium Villages is a very cool idea, one that hadn't been tried before. The keys to the model are integrated programs -- health, infrastructure, education, agriculture -- and local ownership: management of the programs is taken on by the government and by the community members who participate. "What's amazing, of course, is that for so many years, the health people would do this, and the agricultural people would do that, the education people would do this. They wouldn't work together," Karen says.
"I'm trained in public health, and we didn't learn anything about agriculture. When we started planting maize and fertilizer, I had never heard of this stuff, but it's pretty basic -- because with most childhood diseases, the reason they're so bad is because of malnutrition."
Each research village involves intense observation; up to 10 nearby villages clustered around each Millennium Village get the same interventions, but less observation. Some interventions, like the idea of planting maize in rows, have spread on their own, says Karen.
The program focuses on designing uncomplicated interventions and handing over management roles to local people. Those may seem like new ideas, but they're really no-brainers, Karen says. "The economy is not going to develop if everyone's sick," she points out. Plus, time has shown over and over again that programs have to have community buy-in if they're going to last. "That's the only way that something like this is going to continue and not just be something we did for five years," Karen says. "Ultimately, it comes down to the community, and if they don't think it's meeting their needs, then they're not going to be interested."
And interested, they are. Remember that health center that was serving almost no patients? "It wasn't because people weren't sick. It was because there was nothing there, and you had to pay for it," Karen says.
First, a medical student from Philadelphia volunteered to get the center on its feet, tracking down nurses, getting electricity and supplies flowing. He helped train a local coordinator and turned it over. Now, thousands of people come for treatment and for preventive care. "We're seeing a big drop in malaria cases, a big increase in utilization (of the center)," Karen says. "And a big increase in the number of women delivering at the health center," though some women choose to deliver at home.
Plus, the center makes family planning information available to every patient, even if they're just in for a routine vaccination for their child. "People say, you know, 'Rural people, poor people, they're not educated, they won't want to use these methods," Karen says. "We have seen that there aren't a lot of cultural barriers (to family planning). People want to be healthy."
But even more encouraging than this steady move toward progress, and the fact that 25,000 people are participating in this project after a genocide, a drought, and the impact of HIV/AIDS, is that Rwanda is now becoming a living model of what's possible.
Last year, former President Bill Clinton won a wish from TED, the social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, thought leaders, and visionaries from around the world who meet annually to incubate and nurture ideas that can change the world. (As a side note, for your 10 percent more media about possibility, TED has the full catalog of speeches by people you've heard of and people you've never heard of doing the impossible all over the globe here).
Clinton's wish was for help implementing a pilot health care program he helped start in Rwanda using Paul Farmer's successful model from Haiti and other countries Partners In Health have been working. "What we have been trying to do, working first in Rwanda ... is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and child health -- the whole range of health issues that people are grappling with in the developing world --that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda and then can be a model that can literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world."
Karen says, "In places where I've worked in Rwanda, most people want the same things we want. They want a safe place to live, they want to be healthy, they want their kids to be better off than they were." Now Rwandans are leading the way to achieving those simple things for more and more of their fellow citizens, showing the world what's possible, showing us ways that can work around the world to create a world fit for kids.
Speaking of kids, here's a wonderful clip from a video produced entirely by the students at the Mayange school during art classes with Karli. Yeah, making a world fit for these kids. Worth it.
We're getting excited about college at my house. The first son has some applications out, and any day now the mail will come and there'll be drama, excitement, maybe some disappointment, but no matter what, he will get to go to college somewhere. We are so lucky.
Last November, that same boy and I went to a fundraiser for Orphans for Rwanda, an organization founded in 2004 by Dai Ellis and Oliver Rothschild. The two met while working on related projects with Columbia University’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development and the Clinton Foundation on HIV/AIDS programs . They realized there was a need going unfilled: orphans and other socially vulnerable young people in Rwanda needed help if they were going to pursue a university education and ultimately become leaders in economic development and social reconciliation in Rwanda.
Children and teenagers who had lost their families in the 1994 genocide or were losing families to HIV/AIDS needed more than secondary school if they were going to help rebuild. In Rwanda, only 1 in 200 are college graduates -- mostly wealthy, and mostly men. Standardized exams tend to skew for education and background, so the very poor are less likely to go to a university. ORI seeks to change that, to "transform the pool of intellectual capital." (I love thinking about it that way.)
When HumanKind first launched, I wrote about Kiva,
a microcredit institution that lets you lend money, as little as $25 at
a time, to entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world.
You don’t earn interest on your loan, but it does get repaid.
There’s a new organization that takes this idea a giant step
further, turning microcredit lending into a sustainable enterprise by
letting investors earn a profit. It’s called MicroPlace, and it just launched in October.
“It was really just me and a business plan when eBay brought it
in-house in June 2006, and it became a wholly owned subsidiary of
eBay,” says Tracey Pettengill Turner, who came up with the idea for
MicroPlace after doing a fellowship with the newly formed Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh in the late 90s; Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit.
Hurray! It's our three-month anniversary today. On Sept. 4, Liz and I published our first "issue" with our first piece, "A 'what if' for the world," and began a series on poverty. We invited all the people we knew (the first list was probably 150 or so) to read what we were writing, and we even brazenly asked everyone to participate in our first HumanKind Challenge, purchasing mosquito nets (one of the simplest, most effective contributions any of us can make toward the goal of ending extreme poverty in the next decade).
Boy, have we learned a lot since then: For one thing, mark your post "draft" before you hit "save," or you end up sending your subscribers a mess of notes. Don't hesitate to ask anyone for an interview, even someone so cool they're intimidating (almost no one has turned us down yet). Finding possibilities for impossible problems is more fun with friends. And of course: Nothing is impossible.
I've been trying to write this two-paragraph blog on and off for a few hours now, hoping to cover all the cool things I've discovered in the past few weeks that I can't wait to share with all my friends. We're awash in great stories! So instead, I'm giving each of them as a gift to you today: first, a trip through happiness, then some addictive vocabulary-building, and finally, smiles for everyone. All I ask is that you forward anything you take joy from to some of your friends to help spread all this generosity, happiness and caring as far as you can:
Happiness Project Liz got to interview Gretchen because they're both in New York, but I found her first! (I even made a spot on my newly designed high-goodness iGoogle page for a subscription to her blog.) Her easy-going commentary on our individual quests for happiness is inspiring and endlessly helpful. I think I've become happier just watching Gretchen figure it out.
Vocabulary-building to end poverty: Free Rice
No joke. Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don't click if you don't have a few minutes though -- it'll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They've gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn't it amazing what you can do to end poverty (we're assuming we already talked you into a mosquito net) in just a few clicks?
Smiles for Everyone: Smile Cards
You may remember our blog on the Seva Cafe, brought to us by the GlobalOnenessProject. Our friends at GlobalOneness introduced us to the Karma Kitchen in California. CharityFocus.org , creators of way cool "giving economy" projects are, I am certain, transforming the world already, through their endless efforts to spread generosity like a virus through the global internet community. Order your free Smile Cards here and start your own pay-it-forward ripples today. And, of course if you'd like a little more inspiring media today, there's Karma Tube, the "inner-net" YouTube.
These are just a few morsels to whet your appetite for upcoming stories about CharityFocus, the giving economy, and the rapid rise of generosity as the new capital. Stay tuned.
Check out our interview today with Trish Tobin, chief marketing officer for Women for Women. Before Trish took that job, she went on a trip with Women for Women to Rwanda, where she met women who were participating in the program. Looking back, she calls that making "the ultimate connection." She was so surprised by how she and the women she met related to each other that she ditched her corporate job and hasn't looked back.
Now, she's using her amazing marketing skills to try to create those moments of connection with people all over the world -- those of us who can't necessarily meet a Rwandan woman in her home, but who can connect with her another way: through global media.
It's not often I read something on CNN that makes me want to jump out of my seat and cheer -- actually, that would be never -- but today, it happened!
The site published a story today about Kate Roberts, a young advertising executive who realized that while she was an expert at selling stuff to kids, she was only selling things that hurt them, not helped them: gum, soda, cigarettes. Junk. It was, in short, a colossal waste of global media -- and of her own unique talents and abilities.
So Kate ditched that lucrative career and founded YouthAIDS. Now she builds media campaigns "that use pop culture, corporate America, and celebrities" to get life-saving information to people all over the world.
It might seem a little weird to you that I'm writing about this on HumanKind. And pointing you to the mainstreamiest of mainstream media sources, no less. But I was so blown away to see one of our core messages -- the incredible power of global media can actually be wielded for good -- appear so explicity on a web site that gets millions of hits every day, and I wanted to share it with you as an example of what good media with massive reach can do.
Stumble It!
