I have been a longtime fan of Idealist.org, the website that aggregates volunteer opportunities and connects those who want to do good with those who need help. It's a powerful and wonderful tool for change and I don't think enough people know about it.
(Image courtesy Julia Smith at idealist.org)
Founder Ami Dar, a globetrotter who was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Peru and Mexico, and now lives in New York, started the site with a vision of creating a global network of people and organizations hoping to make a difference. Seventeen years after his idea began to germinate, Idealist has now become one of the most popular nonprofit resources on the web, hosting information provided by 70,000 organizations around the world and 100,000 visitors every day.
A few years ago, during a transitional period in my life, I wanted to try something new and was exploring the idea of volunteering internationally. This is how I stumbled upon Idealist.org, which, at my last check, had 13,000+ volunteer opportunities listed around the world -- organizations and projects looking for things from volunteer attorneys to computer instructors to phone bank counselors to skilled medical workers willing to travel to third world countries.
I'm sorry to say that when I first discovered Idealist I did not end up finding an exact match for my needs, but I did fall in love with the site and I continue to check in with it periodically, just to see what kind of opportunities are available. I am always amazed at what I find. Aside from charitable and volunteer opportunities, there are real career and lifestyle options -- like a position on a New Zealand farm that pays room and board, or a fully-paid-with-benefits job in Thailand as a grants manager. And even though I'm not personally looking to make a change in my life right now, there is something inspiring about the possibilities. I also find Idealist a creative place to look for ideas for starting local programs in my own community.
They list more than 8,100 jobs, 5,700 internships, and 600 events that are all searchable by the public, for free. Beyond the volunteer mission, it's a vital hub of nonprofit information. Idealist itself is a nonprofit, funded by donation, earned income from job posters, and foundational grants under the banner of Action Without Borders, a 501(c)(3) organization.
Idealist also puts on a series of Graduate Degree Fairs for the Public Good, publishes a selection of handbooks on making a difference in the world, hosts an active and informative blog, and has founded several online informational centers for those looking to learn more about the nonprofit world. They kick off their Grad Fair season next month, so if you're in the job market, make sure to check outidealist.org/gradfairs.
Whether you are looking for a volunteer opportunity in your own neighborhood once a month, or immerse yourself in another culture, Idealist is an easy way to find out what is out there and who needs you. Or like me, you can just browse in order to get inspired, and remember that you always have options in life to help others, and many are just a plane ride away and come with full room and board.
Do you have an inspiring story about a connection idealist.org made for you? Email it to me : jesseseaver+idealist(at)gmail(dot)com.
Last week the American Himalayan Foundation (AHF) hosted a beautiful dinner at the Four Seasons in San Francisco to support its "Stop Girl Trafficking" program. The three keynote speakers were Jon Krakauer, mountain climber and bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air; Siddharth Kara, Harvard Fellow and author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery; and Dr. Aruna Uprenty, AHF's on-the-ground "visionary partner" in Nepal, the founder of this program. They each spoke about the issue of girl trafficking and the best solution to stopping it: the education of Nepalese girls.
The indomitable Dr. Aruna Uprety, champion of AHF's anti-trafficking efforts, with a few of her friends. Permission courtesy of Eileen Moncoeur.
Every year, around 20,000 girls are taken from their homes in Nepal and transported to India and the Middle East to work as slaves. Of these 20,000, it is estimated that 12,000 to 15,000 end up as prostitutes in Indian brothels. If a girl tries to fight, refuse or run, she is burned with cigarettes, beaten, abused and threatened. Some of these girls are as young as nine years old.
How does this happen?
Poor, indebted Nepalese parents see their daughters as a liability. If their poverty reaches a point where they can no longer feed their children, it's tragic but common practice to sell a daughter for as little as $200 to a broker who will take her to India, where demand is supposedly high for house servants to wash dishes and clean toilets. For struggling families whose daughters don't have a bright future in Nepal, this can sound like a reasonable choice. Their daughters will end up in households in India, presumably under the safeguard of the families they are sent to work for. But little do the parents know, or want to know, that they are actually giving their daughters away to become enslaved prostitutes. These girls are generally taken to cities far away, like Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, where they do not speak the language and no one can understand them except for other abducted girls from Nepal. These are young children, with no recourse to defend themselves.
In India, there is a myth that sleeping with a young girl is an antidote for HIV/AIDS. Because of this, very young Nepali girls are a sought after commodity, and the tragic result is that over 60 percent of the abducted Nepali girls are essentially used as sacrifices and infected with HIV/AIDs. According to a Human Rights Watch study, in 1995, it was estimated that of the 100,000 sex trade workers living in Mumbai, 50,000 were from Nepal.
While sex trafficking is technically illegal in both Nepal and India, it easily goes undetected and unenforced. The border between these two countries is open and Indians and Nepalis are free to come and go, no questions asked. Most of the girls who leave go willingly, often because they are told they are traveling to jobs in wealthier foreign countries (like Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates) or they are told they are going to meet an Indian husband in an arranged marriage. Some of the girls are drugged and have no idea what is happening, only to wake up on a train or a bus headed for an Indian brothel.
Indian abductors prey upon families from rural villages who are extremely poor, uneducated and lower caste. In economic desperation, these families willingly sell their daughters. Perhaps most disturbingly, both governments and police are often complicit in the abductions, accepting bribes to look the other way. There are occasional police raids on brothels in India and there are both Indian and Nepali NGO rescue agencies which help return Nepali girls from far-flung Indian cities back to Nepal. But for many of the kidnapped girls it is too late; they refuse to go home because they know they will be stigmatized and ostracized. Even if a girl is rescued and returns to Nepal, she is generally detained like a criminal until her family picks her up (which they often never do). She is forced to have a medical exam, and if she is HIV positive, she is stigmatized. For the few who make it back to their villages, they are summarily abandoned and shunned by family for bringing shame upon them.
The most effective approach to stopping this sex trade trafficking is to prevent it in the first place, which requires a huge cultural shift, and that starts with education. Like so many third world epidemics, the root causes of sex trafficking are lack of education, poverty and indebtedness. American Himalayan Foundation's Stop Girl Trafficking program is one of the most effective ways to end this horrible practice of flesh trade. The AHF program is built on a very simple premise: target the most likely areas where traffickers prey, put the girls in school, and educate them and their families about sex trafficking. The traffickers steer clear of villages where they know such programs exist and continue to prey on the more ignorant pockets.
Through AHF and Dr. Uprety's efforts this year, Stop Girl Trafficking has supported 9,500 girls in 400 schools across Nepal, and not one girl has been lost to trafficking. For more information about The Stop Girl Trafficking project and ways you can contribute, visit The American Himalayan Foundation website.
When Olga Murphy went to Nepal in 1984 she met the children who inspired the founding of her organization,The Nepal Youth Foundation (NYF). As she camped atop a mountain, watching a group of local children struggling to study by lantern on a crude plank table, she realized what she wanted to do with the rest of her life: help Nepali families gain access to better education and resources.
Since that trip, she has returned to Nepal every year except one, and now spends half of each year there. She considers it her second home. And slowly, but with determination and constantly inspired by the Nepalese children who are so eager to learn, she has forged The Nepal Youth Foundation.
Within a few years of her first trip to Nepal, Murphy had gathered about 80 sponsors and formed the official non-profit. At first a simple initiative to better educate Nepalese children, NYF is now a comprehensive and sophisticated foundation offering multiple programs and contributing to the greater society. Major projects include a full scholarship program that takes recipients from kindergarten through medical school, two small children's homes, 14 hospitals for malnourished children, and a flourishing program (The Indentured Daughters Program) to abolish child slavery in Nepal. NYF has also launched two counseling centers -- one for vocational counseling and another for psycho-social counseling.
(Permission to use photo courtesy The Nepal Youth Foundation)
One of NYF's most successful programs is called Child Mother Pairs. In conjunction with the Nepalese government, they have founded hospitals which act on charity donations to provide a full month of care and training to a mother and her child for only $250. This program brings malnourished and sick children back to health, trains their mothers in their future care, and then trains mothers to train other mothers to do the same. It's a genuine community education endeavor which extends beyond the hospital walls and is making an impact on the health of families throughout the communities by promoting childcare and nutrition education on a grassroots level. Of this pioneering program, Olga Murphy says: "They get everything they need. Medical care, counseling, healthy food and water, large beds so they can stay with their children -- all for $250 a month. We have also just built a center just outside Kathmandu, where we are building a library, hiring dietitians to educate the Nepali mothers, and starting village outreach programs."
Much of what NYF does is raise awareness within the Nepalese community, teaching proper childcare and nutrition. But through their Indentured Daughters Program, they have also saved over 12,000 girls from forced labor. It has been common practice in Nepal for children to be bonded away as labor by their parents for as little as $50 a year. But the Indentured Daughters Program is saving lives by changing minds. "We were able to change the mentality of the people," says Murphy. "We are turning the community against the custom, so that this will be the last generation of girls that will be sold. It is no longer okay to send your daughter away; it is now looked at by the community as shameful." The program -- which has included a massive nationwide awareness effort including street campaigns and lawsuits -- has been very successful at freeing girls from bondage as well as irradiating the custom at its root level.
NYF is a four-star Charity Navigator charity, and is able to send 81 percent of the money they raise to directly benefit needy children in Nepal. Only 19 percent is spent on fundraising, and with a $2 million budget in 2011, this is no small achievement. NYF stands as one of, if not the best charity available to donors wishing to help the children of Nepal.
As I write this, on the eve of Mother's Day 2012, I can't think of a better gift to support the beauty and sanctity of motherhood and make a real difference to a mother and her child. I applaud the work and life of Olga Murphy, and hope one day to have even a sliver of the success she has had in making a difference to the people of Nepal and beyond. She turns 87 on May 30, and when I asked her if she would have done anything differently, she said, "I just wish I started sooner."
What do chocolate pumps have to do with solving world hunger? Quite a bit, if you ask the Akshaya Patra Foundation. The Balgdon Pump, initially designed to pump liquid chocolate, helps complete the herculean task of preparing fresh nutritious meals for over 1.3 million impoverished children daily in government-run schools across ten Indian states. For many children, this is their only complete meal of the day, which gives them an incentive to come to school, stay in school, and focus on learning.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a public-private partnership, is the largest NGO-run midday meal program in the world. It utilizes innovative technology, smart engineering and good management to reach and continue to grow its current levels of service delivery and keep costs low. It costs them just $15 to feed each child for an entire academic school year.
Madhu Pandit, a graduate of the premier Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, founded Akshaya Patra with a group of dedicated social entrepreneurs who were also leaders in the Indian IT, engineering and business communities. This group of individuals recognized the seemingly insurmountable problem of childhood hunger and its effects on access to education, and on India's -- and ultimately the world's -- economic and social development. Fortunately, the founders possessed the engineering skills needed to design equipment and layout for a mechanized kitchen which can efficiently cook nutritious meals for large numbers of children at a low-cost.
Their school meal program started modestly, feeding 1,500 underprivileged children in five government schools in Bangalore. A month after the program began, teachers started to report increased attendance by students, and letters started pouring in from neighboring schools asking to be included. This was a defining moment for Pandit as he realized just what one complete meal a day means to children and their families. He saw this as an important strategic intervention in education that unlocks the vicious and perpetual cycle of poverty.
Technical Innovation in a Commercial Kitchen
While the Balgdon chocolate pump is now far removed from the chocolate industry, its function -- to move very viscous fluid -- remains the same. Akshaya Patra ingeniously uses it to pump the "ganji" (excess water from cooking rice) out of the rice cauldrons, where it is then recycled for use in bio-culture or vehicle washing water. This is not the only piece of innovative technology they have become to be known for.
The hallmark of Akshaya Patra's program is its centralized kitchen facilities, which have been designed and engineered to optimize quality and minimize cost, time and labor. These fully automated kitchens can prepare 185,000 meals in less than five hours by utilizing gravity flow mechanisms to minimize human handling of food, mechanized high-speed cutting of vegetables and conveyor belts for easy transportation. Large stainless steel cauldrons with easy-tilt mechanisms prepare 1,200 liters of lentils in two hours and a specially designed roti-making machine cooks up 40,000 rotis (flat whole wheat bread) in one hour. Steam is used as a source of cooking, which accelerates the cooking process, retains nutrients, and is cost-effective and clean. To date, six of the Akshaya Patra kitchens have received FSMS ISO 22000:2005 certification -- a first of its kind achievement for an NGO.
Total Efficiency from Kitchen to School
After the food leaves the kitchen, the Akshaya Patra meal delivery system involves well-coordinated precision logistics using custom designed vehicles that quickly and safely deliver cooked food to schools according to a strict schedule, with optimal storage and minimal spillage. In an effort to minimize fuel consumption and cost, they have developed route simulation software. A pilot run of this tool reduced the number of routes in the Bangalore South kitchen by 10 percent, and experts estimate that an optimization opportunity of up to 15 percent exists if the tool is implemented across all units. Efficiencies in logistics operations were improved by making use of GPS technology in meal delivery vehicles and automating attendance data collection from the schools using IVRS hand-held devices.
Given the size of Akshaya Patra's operation, a strain exists on the local natural resources. India, having 18 percent of the world's population on 2.4 percent of the world's total area, has experienced environmental degradation such as water shortages, soil exhaustion and erosion, deforestation, and air and water pollution. In a bid to reverse this trend, Akshaya Patra has adopted several environmentally friendly practices. Six of the twenty one kitchen locations use Briquette run boilers, fueled by groundnut husk or rice bran instead of diesel. Rain water is harvested and re-routed into a pond, recharging bore-wells and reducing dependency on corporation water. Smokeless stoves are being piloted in their Bangalore location. A mini-fan, powered by rechargeable batteries and controlled by a regulator, blows air to fan the flames. This has helped to reduce fuel cost by 50 percent.
Despite India's booming economic growth, the country is still home to hundreds of millions of people suffering from the dual tragedies of malnutrition and a lack of education. UNICEF estimates that 57 million Indian children are malnourished, impairing their cognitive and social development. The 2011 Global Hunger Index, a report published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, placed India at 67 out of 81 developing countries in hunger. Unless these serious problems are addressed, large numbers of India's children will remain unhealthy and uneducated. This poses a serious obstacle to India's ability to participate effectively in the world economy. It is estimated that child malnutrition is responsible for 22 percent of the country's burden of disease, affecting productivity, income and consumption. Reduced productivity costs India's economy approximately $2.5 billion annually. With a potential labor and consumer force of one billion people, this can have serious implications for the global economy.
A wholesome mid-day meal, served in schools, helps break the cycle of poverty and helps children to become productive global citizens. India's expanding economy, in this global environment, presents extraordinary opportunities for large numbers of young people, but those who remain uneducated, unskilled and unhealthy will have poor prospects. Akshaya Patra's technology applications benefit humanity by liberating children from hunger and a lack of education. They are investing in a better world by protecting our future. This is a cause I can get behind.
We all need a place to eat, and we all need a place to learn. The more support we have in these two areas when we are young, the better our chances of not growing up to be hungry adults. For most children, the primary environment in which they eat and learn is school. They also do a lot of their learning in the library. I think protecting our libraries is just as important as protecting the nourishment of our young population. Libraries -- both in our schools and in our communities -- are vital building blocks for youth.
This is why it's alarming that, according to IMLS.gov , a recent report shows that library funding has seen a 34% decline nationwide in the past three years. Some states, like New Mexico and Florida, report record drops in budget revenue (as much as 50%) and cuts totaling more than 14 million dollars.
While chances for library funding have decreased, they have not disappeared altogether. I was inspired by the recent creative approach to this issue by the children and adults at M.N. Spear Memorial Library in Shutesbury, MA. This community has launched an online video campaign to save a vital resource: their historic 100-year-old library, which is so small that "weekly story hours can only accommodate 5 or 6 children" and which desperately needs plumbing and structural repairs.
The State Library Commission promised the Shutesbury library 2.1 million dollars for upgrades, but here's the catch: in order to get the funds, they must first raise $1.4 million on their own. Their efforts to raise the money are working, thanks to social media and one generous donor. If you ask me, donating to the Shutesbury library is a pretty good investment: taxpayers get a 250% return on their investment once the entire 3.5 million dollars turns into a new library for the community. Check out Shutesbury's effort:
Even if you don't live in Shutebury or even in Massachusetts, supporting one small town's library system is a great way to show your support of libraries in general, especially in this age of digital media. Libraries still serve their purpose: they are physical places of learning and community, especially for children. Mary Anne Antonellis, Director of the M.N. Spear Memorial Library, says that "the children's room is the heart of the library" where young and old come together to pass down the traditions and knowledge of their communities. Saving a library is a great way to support the intellect of a young population, while also helping forge a relationship between the communities' young and elder populations.
Of course, a library is only as useful as the health of its patrons. Many of the libraries in the world are in schools, and their patrons are students. This means that the libraries are only as useful as the health of the student bodies, and this is especially true for younger students.
One of the most important things for elementary and high school students is access to quality food, both at school and at home. According to the ConnAgra Foods Foundation, child hunger is "a major issue" in America: "During the 2009-2010 school year, 20 million children received free or reduced-price lunches through the National School Lunch Program, but only 2.3 million children received meals during the summer months of 2009 through the Summer Food Service Program." That's 17.7 million children that we can only hope were able to eat decently over the summer months while school was not in session.
Shridhar Venkat, who runs one of the largest school lunch programs in the world, Akshaya Patra Foundation, recently was quoted in an NPR story saying, "Feeding a child is not charity." I think most of us would agree. Not only is it not charity, nourishment is the essential element which got all of us adults to where we are today.
Efforts to keep our young population well nourished and well educated will always come back to us tenfold. I support budget increases for libraries and food programs simply because the health and wellness of today's youth is a direct indicator of who our leaders will be in a few decades. Programs like Akshaya Patra and the M.N Spear Memorial Library are the glue of society that keep food on our children's plates and education flowing through their minds. Let's support them!
Curry Without Worry
