Posted by Helen on: 06.28.2006 /
Dave Richards, co-founder and board member of Off The Map, has a blog called Defeating Global Poverty. It impresses me to see personal blogs as focused on MTWABP as Dave’s is.
- Is global poverty something you think about much?
- Is it something you feel a responsibility to try to alleviate?
- Is there anything specific you do/have done to help alleviate it?
- Does it seem such an overwhelming problem it’s hard to know where to start or what to do?
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5 Responses to "Defeating Global Poverty"
Comment by: Marty
1 06/28/06 7:38 AM | Comment Link |Somehow Global Poverty is a concept too big for me to get my arms around and do something practical about - even though it does concern and get to me.
What I can get my arms around is something smaller and something that I can make a difference - is doable - at least doable in small ways.
Today I will be speaking at the Santa Barbara United Nations Association meeting about a program called Light Up The World (www.lutw.org). This program, led by an Electrical Engineering Professor at the University of Calgary (Dr. Dave Irvine-Halliday) has developed a lighting system that combines arrays of extremely low energy consuming Light Emitting Diodes (LED’s), a solar panel and a battery (motorcyle battery type) that can provide sustainable light to a villagers home for $100 or so per unit. There are 2 billion people in the world without electricity.
Our local program is led by Dr. Walter Kohn a Nobel Laurette in Chemistry (http://powerofthesun.ucsb.edu/) who has produced and stared in a one hour video on “The Power of the Sun.” Another professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara is Dr. Shuji Nakamura - inventor of the Light Emitting Diode. Shuji has just won a major international prize (included $1.2 million) and has indicated his committment to bringing light to third world countries and will be contributing to Light up the World and Engineers without Borders - who are also involved in our local program.
My sense is that if we can find specific niche’s like this to focus our time/money contributions on - we can truly make a difference without being overwhelmed.
Comment by: Helen M.
2 06/28/06 7:50 AM | Comment Link |Yes indeed. Wow - Marty, thanks for sharing what you’re doing today to MTWABP!
Comment by: Julie marie
3 06/28/06 9:52 AM | Comment Link |my old church supports water missions international, who build and send commericial water purifying systems to 3rd world nations. they also sent them to Katrina victims and the tsunami victims. I am really proud of my church for that. theres no evangelism involved, just helping in a practical way. if you don’t have clean water to drink, many other problems are irrelevant.
Comment by: Dave Richards
4 06/29/06 6:57 AM | Comment Link |I started writing about this blog as part of my own “schooling” in the facts about global poverty. I found it very difficult to find a good source for facts about what is working and where people are innovating vs. just do the same old things that sound good but have very suspect results. [Of course, every group that's helping poor have their poster child, but very few of these groups are willing to look evaluate the results on truly impacting poverty.] So, my hope is that other people who have this same interest will save some time by reading my blog.
My interest is looking for what actually works on the ground AND which has the possibility of being scaled/replicated to help lots of people. This doesn’t mean that efforts that help a few people aren’t good … they are just less interesting to me. I am also most interested in approaches which have the potential for sustainably defeating poverty vs. simply putting a bandaid on a situation. That doesn’t mean that activities to help people survive aren’t important (our family continues to fund relief), but it is just that “relief” without the ultimate goal of sustainable change.
Comment by: Helen M.
5 06/29/06 12:54 PM | Comment Link |Thanks for your comments, Dave.
That makes sense.