Search results for: poverty

“Development should aim at the growth of the whole person … while also respecting the religious beliefs of the beneficiaries.” So said the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, scholar-monk and inspiration behind Buddhist Global Relief, our current Challenge the Gap beneficiary.

Buddhist Global Relief’s mission is simple to put into words—to combat chronic hunger and malnutrition—but the work they do is anything but simple. Their vision is a complex image of a future without poverty, with equal access to education, where we live in harmony with our natural world, and where all people have the shelter, clothing, and health care they need.

To work toward their vision of an improved world, Buddhist Global Relief works to sponsor programs around the globe run by local organizations with track records of success in those communities. These programs support the BGR mission by providing direct food aid, developing sustainable approaches to food production, educating young women and girls, and giving girls opportunities to start projects to support their families. While being featured as a FBB beneficiary, Buddhist Global Relief has three major programs:

• For the third consecutive year, BGR has awarded a grant to Lotus Outreach in Cambodia to “provide critical monthly rice support to fifty families of at-risk and exploited girl students enrolled in the Girls’ Access to Education (GATE) scholarship project.” Many families in rural Cambodia are too impoverished to afford to send their children to school, especially young girls. This program ensures these young girls an education through direct aid of rice to their families, and lowers the families’ opportunity cost of keeping the girls in school.
• Again working with Lotus Outreach, BGR is supporting an agricultural program in the Cardamom Mountains in Southwest Cambodia. This program provides a variety of seeds, along with farming tools and agricultural education, to improvised families in the region to both protect against established, harmful ways of making a living (such as logging and poaching) and create a more sustainable future for the families.
• In an ongoing five-year project, Buddhist Global Relief is offering support to the Bodhicitta Foundation/Kalyanamitra Fund International to provide education for 200 children, focusing mainly on young girls, in the Dalit (also known as “untouchables”) community in Nagpur, India. This community has long faced extreme poverty and discrimination in India, and the program will provide much-needed school supplies along with basic food aid for their families in order for the children to attend school. The program also offers a social worker to counsel the children and help build their self-esteem.

Buddhist Global Relief has supporters all over the globe. Their recent Walk to End Hunger fundraiser was held at 12 sites across the world, including numerous sites in the United States. For information about how to become involved with BGR from your location, check out their volunteer opportunities here.

Nourishing USA, our current Poverty and Health beneficiary, is an organization with incredible reach. 

Only a year ago they expanded far beyond their locale, changing their name from Nourishing NYC to Nourishing USA. They now consist of more than 2,000 advocates and organizations across the United States and Puerto Rico. Determined to educate the public on and fight against the correlation between poverty and obesity, and help everyone achieve excellent nutrition, they support soup kitchens, pantries, and educational programs with a triple aim of feeding, educating, and advocating.

Recently, Nourishing USA released simple, user-friendly downloadable guides to assist with the development of nutritional and educational programs. For those interested in starting a local Junior Chef Class, a cooking and nutrition class aimed at vulnerable youth, the “Junior Chef Teaching Guide” contains tips on how to run the class and teach, as well as recipes and ready-made handouts. 

Also available is the “Soup Kitchen Culinary and Nutritional Guide,” aimed at supporting community food programs in their quest to provide balanced meals and education. The 52 healthy recipes included in the guide are nutritionally balanced, aimed at feeding 50 people, and take into account the ingredient availability and budget of soup kitchens. The guide also contains educational information such as handouts on nutrition.

Although feeding programs are widespread, the availability of simple and tailor-made information on nutrition is sparse, and Nourishing USA is attempting to fill those gaps with their downloadable guides, helping to ensure that feeding programs are involved in creating a sustainable impact while nourishing the hungry.

For more information about Nourishing USA and their new digital resources, visit their website. 

Fourth-quarter 2011 health beneficiary the African Medical and Research Foundation gave us this report about how they are using the funds contributed by members of Foundation Beyond Belief. Members donated $3,795 to AMREF last quarter.

AMREF’s mission is to improve health, alleviate poverty, and bring hope to many of the poorest families in Africa. This quarter, Foundation Beyond Belief donated $3,795 in funding to AMREF. This core support is essential to AMREF because it gives us the flexibility to respond to unexpected situations and to take advantage of new opportunities while continuing to strengthen our existing programs. This allows us to increase our capacity to provide high-quality and innovative programming throughout the continent.

Core support from the Foundation Beyond Belief enables AMREF to execute initiatives such as

• Meeting the urgent need for human resources for health in Africa by sponsoring students in AMREF’s various training courses.
• Providing water, food, and medical services to hundreds of thousands of families hit by the devastating drought in East Africa.
• Funding research and program evaluation to ensure program quality and the development of replicable best-practice approaches.

Additionally, your support has helped us maintain the highest standard of program and fiscal excellence. We are proud to note that for the seventh consecutive year, AMREF achieved the highest rating available for sound fiscal management by Charity Navigator, America’s premier charity evaluator. Only 2% of charities have received at least seven consecutive 4-star evaluations, indicating that AMREF consistently executes its mission in a fiscally responsible way, and outperforms most other charities in America. AMREF USA also meets the 20 rigorous standards of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a Charity Seal awarded by the Better Business Bureau.

On behalf of the whole of AMREF, AMREF USA extends its sincere gratitude to Foundation Beyond Belief for its generous support.

Fourth-quarter 2011 poverty beneficiary ActionAid USA gave us this report about how they are using the funds contributed by members of Foundation Beyond Belief. Members donated $3,905 to ActionAid last quarter.

ActionAid USA is grateful to Foundation Beyond Belief and its donors for their continued support.  Using funds received from FBB, ActionAid will take a rights-based approach to fighting poverty in developing countries on a variety of fronts, from gender-based violence to climate change.  In the United States, ActionAid conducts research, advocacy campaigns, and targeted outreach, both to inform the U.S. public and to build solidarity with the poor internationally.

In all our work, ActionAid takes sides with poor people to help them understand their rights and confront the injustices that hold them back. We campaign with governments to ensure that their decisions on aid, lending, and trade agreements respect the rights of poor people. Below is a sample of our programs:

Learn about ActionAid, our current Poverty beneficiary, and the work they’re doing in 50 countries around the world to fight poverty and the injustices that accompany it.
 

First-quarter poverty beneficiary Women Thrive Worldwide gave us this report about how they are using the funds contributed by members of Foundation Beyond Belief. Foundation members donated $3,075 to Women Thrive Worldwide last quarter.

Thank you so much for including Women Thrive Worldwide under your poverty initiative. The humanist values of your organization embody the type of support that is needed by women around the world.

Foundation Beyond Belief’s generous donation helps us form a circle of protection around poverty and human rights programs benefitting the most vulnerable women around the world.

Poverty-focused international assistance is less than 1 percent of the US budget. Your support comes at a critical time for the women and girls we seek to empower.

Our recent efforts have been focused on preventing dangerous budget cuts to food and poverty aid programs in poor countries. As part of the Hungerfast that we co-launched earlier in April, President and Co-Founder of Women Thrive Worldwide Ritu Sharma has been fasting to highlight this very important issue, and we are happy to share that we have really had an impact on Congress. Programs for the very poor and hungry were cut a little or not at all in the 2011 budget. We could not have done this without your support, and other activists and donors like you!

But our job is not done. As Congress continues budget discussions for FY12 and beyond, your support helps to amplify the voice of women around the world and call for a just budget that does not punish those living in poverty and hunger worldwide.

Thank you again for your interest. Please see the links below for press articles covering our work in the first quarter of 2011. And feel free to visit our website for continued updates about what we are doing to support women living in poverty worldwide.

CNN | BELIEF BLOG: Hunger strike aims at congressional cuts
HUFFINGTON POST | BLOGGER JIM WALLIS: 10 Reasons Why I’m Fasting for a Better Budget
PBS | RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY: Prayer and Fasting Campaign on Budget Cuts (video)
BALTIMORE SUN: Punishing the Hungry to Shrink the Deficit

Roots & Wings International, our current Education beneficiary, continues to bring educational opportunities to the indigenous poor of Guatemala through university scholarships, computer literacy programs, and after-school tutoring.

Twelve-year-old Manuela Tambríz Chox participates in RWI’s computer literacy training and after-school tutoring program. In Guatemala, 60 percent of the population does not graduate from elementary school, so RWI has designed these programs to help children aged 5 to 11 remain in school and successfully complete elementary school.

Manuela’s father Manuel works as an agricultural laborer, while her mother María works in housekeeping. Although her parents earn less than US $2 per day, they have made the commitment to enroll Manuela in school with the hope that an education will provide their daughter with a more promising future. Manuela is a hard-working fifth-grader who aspires to be a doctor one day.

RWI includes a specific non-sectarian statement on its website: “Roots & Wings Int’l is not affiliated with any church or political organization, and we do not promote any religious or ideological perspective. Our goal is to encourage students to develop their own world view based in their own culture and life experience” — a perfect fit for Foundation Beyond Belief.

Learn more about RWI:

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Our current Poverty beneficiary Women Thrive Worldwide applauded the new policy released last month by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which focuses increased attention on women and girls as recipients and beneficiaries of US foreign assistance — increasingly recognized as a best practice for humanitarian and developmental assistance.

“Up to now, USAID has not consistently used gender-sensitive indicators and collected sex-disaggregated baseline data as part of its evaluation procedures,” said Anu Palan, Vice President of Communications for Women Thrive. The new evaluation policy “rejuvenates past evaluation excellence at USAID by incorporating attention to gender across all relevant areas of evaluation, increasing USAID’s accountability to and its effectiveness in reaching both women and men living in poverty.”

“It is crucial for all U.S. assistance programs to take the needs and voices of women and girls into account, especially since women are the majority of the world’s poorest citizens,” said WTW President Ritu Sharma. “We welcome the fact that USAID is taking this approach to ensure that women truly benefit from all its efforts.”

Women Thrive and its partners in the Gender, Policy and Foreign Assistance Working Group (GPFA) “understand that the true test of these good intentions lies in implementation,” said Palan. “GPFA will work to ensure that these reforms result in a meaningful improvement in the lives of women, men, girls and boys living in poverty around the world.”

The Mountain Fund, our Poverty beneficiary for the current quarter, supports projects in mountain regions around the world. Our August 14 email poll of members asked which of the following Mountain Fund projects should receive our support:  

1. Ward 9 Pokhara, Nepal (improving a daycare center for homeless children); 
2. Aynikuy Microfinance, Peru (providing small loans to businesses run by Peruvian families in need); 
3. Benefit El Salvador (providing equipment and supplies for rural health care clinics serving 40,000 Salvadorans); 
4. Mount Everest Foundation (funding vocational training, school supplies, and health clinic supplies in the Okhaldhunga District of Nepal). 

After one week of voting, the results are in: 35 percent of the 146 poll respondents chose the Mount Everest Foundation project, with each of the other worthy projects netting 20-23 percent of the vote.

Our estimated contribution will provide a year of school supplies for 20 children, vocational training for 10 adults, and medical supplies for the local health clinic for five full years.

A few members emailed in response to the poll, including one who was incredulous at the distance our donation (currently projected at $2200-2500) will go in the Nepalese economy.

“Even if it funded the clinic for a year or so I would have been astonished,” she said. “But five years?? I hope we’ll continue to fund these projects where a little goes a long way. Better than pouring our money into one of the big buckets.”

Watch for more member polls in the coming weeks.

Learn more about the Mount Everest Foundation