Bill and Melinda Gates discuss three myths about the poor. http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304149404579324530112590864?mobile=y Continue reading

New York Times-Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life By Andrea Elliott Gracie Mansion is something of an oddity. In a city with a 2 percent vacancy rate and a shortage of public housing, the mayoral residence sits uninhabited on 11 pristine acres of the Upper East Side. . . . What impresses Dasani most are not the architectural details or the gold-bound volumes of Chaucer and Tolstoy, but the astonishing lack of dust. She runs her hand lightly over the top of a Steinway piano. “I tell you,” she says. “This house is clean.” Read the entire article. Continue reading

New York Times-Microcredit for Americans By Shaila Dewan On a recent Thursday, dozens of Latina immigrants clustered in a small, noisy second-floor office in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, waiting for one of a half-dozen loan officers to call their names and hand over a check. Children loitered in the stairwell or sprawled, calflike, over their mothers’ laps. Read entire article. Continue reading

The UN's report on the happiest countries demonstrates money can help create happiness but also can hurt it.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130909-2013-world-happiness-report-united-nations/?utm_source=NatGeocom&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=inside_20130919&utm_campaign=Content Continue reading

GiveDirectly is a charity which gives money to some of the world's poorest people without any strings attached. The New York Times looked at whether such an approach is a good one. The author Jacob Goldstein concluded "At its most basic level, after all, GiveDirectly's work is an attempt to test one of the simplest ideas in economics-that people know what they need, and if they have money, they can buy it. Taken at its logical conclusion, this suggests that giving away money may often be more helpful to people than giving them cows, or medicine, or training, or whatever." Continue reading

This story gives an interesting perspective on the influences on generosity. One of the stories involves Bill Gates's wife Melinda's influence on Bill. She motivated him to start the Billionaire pledge after she read a book on a family selling their house and giving half of it away. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/why-men-need-women.html?pagewanted=all Continue reading

Ants. That's what first popped into my head. Looking down the cliff from where we were standing, it looked like thousands of ants were moving about, except they weren’t ants... They were people. Read more from this website about two great organizations helping in Guatemala City.http://educationbreakingpoverty.weebly.com/index.html Continue reading

Check out this list of the worst charities. http://www.tampabay.com/americas-worst-charities/ Continue reading

Stanford Graduate School of Business Lecturer, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen who has given away lots of money has posted materials from her course at Stanford. She created the blog to help make your giving matter more. Continue reading

This TED talk challenges us to think of charities in a different way. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html Continue reading

New York Times-Is It Crazy to Think We Can Eradicate Poverty? By Annie Lowrey At a news conference during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in late April, Jim Yong Kim held up a piece of paper with the year “2030” scribbled on it in pen. “This is it,” said Kim, the genial American physician who took over as president of the World Bank last summer. “This is the global target to end poverty.” Read the entire article. Continue reading

Wall Street Journal-- Hunger Plunges Everywhere in SoutheastAsia, Except the Philippines By Eric Bellman The total number of chronically hungry people in Southeast Asia has plunged by close to 70 million in the last two decades thanks to economic growth and policies to feed the poor, but the number of people that regularly go to sleep with their stomachs growling in the Philippines has actually grown. Read more. Continue reading

Wall Street Journal—Fighting Poverty In Times of Crisis Continue reading

We have been supporters of Safe Passage for the past four years. Scott visited their operations in Guatemala this past week. We are now even more thrilled to support this wonderful organization. Here is some information from the organization’s website. Safe Passage enables the children enrolled in our program to attend Guatemalan public school by providing financial support to cover costs of enrollment, school supplies, and uniforms. Read more. Continue reading

New York Times—Before a Test, a Poverty of Words By Ginia Bellafante Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family’s apartment with the enthusiastic declaration “Ottoman is back!” The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had been caused by a visit to someone called “an upholsterer.” Read more. Continue reading

New York Times—Before a Test, a Poverty of Words By Ginia Bellafante Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family’s apartment with the enthusiastic declaration “Ottoman is back!” The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had been caused by a visit to someone called “an upholsterer.” Read more. Continue reading

The Washington Post: Report finds pockets of child poverty among emerging D.C. neighborhoods By Candace Wheeler In the District’s Edgewood neighborhood, abandoned warehouses, barbed-wire fences and the swooping lines of graffiti on buildings are visible just across the street from a bustling shopping center and new luxury apartments. Development cropping up in the adjacent, gentrifying community of Brentwood has done little to change the plight of many of Edgewood’s longtime residents, especially children, according to a report prepared for release Thursday by DC Kids Count, a non-profit research and advocacy group. Read more. Continue reading

CBSNews.com—Why it Matters: Income Inequality The issue: The income gap between the rich and everyone else is large and getting larger, while middle-class incomes stagnate. That's raised concerns that the nation's middle class isn't sharing in economic growth as it has in the past. And it sparked the Wall Street protests that spread to other cities in the country. Where they stand: President Barack Obama would raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year, plus set a minimum tax rate of 30 percent for those who earn $1 million or more. He also wants to spend more on... Continue reading

Today we feature the Save the Child Movement in India. Here is some information for its website. India has the unfortunate distinction of having the largest number of victims of child labour, bonded labour and trafficking engaged in hazardous and exploitative situations. BBA receives complaints from parents and gathers information from various sources about such children, rescues them with the help of government authorities, and reunites them with their families. Read more. Continue reading

I hate making mistakes, especially ones that are preventable. I recently left my phone charger in my hotel room in Chicago. This was after I carefully checked the room. I thought about calling the hotel but I figured the charger would not be turned in. I started using an old charger so I was pretty well set (though the old charger was on its last legs). When I was back in Chicago a few weeks later and near the hotel, I wondered if I could get my charger back. We stopped by the hotel and much to our surprise, the... Continue reading

New York Times—Turning Up the Volume on Global Poverty By Jon Pareles Cranked-up guitars and sobering statistics shared a Central Park audience of more than 60,000 people on Saturday at the Global Citizen Festival, a five-hour concert on the Great Lawn devoted to ending extreme poverty worldwide. The concert was also webcast internationally. Read more. Continue reading

New York Times-- Yum Brands Puts Focus on Hunger Relief By Andrew Adam Newman CORPORATE philanthropy may seem straightforward, with companies cutting checks to grateful charities, then receiving nothing but plaudits from consumers and the media. That was far from the case in 2010, however, with Buckets for the Cure, when KFC announced that for about five weeks it would serve its chicken in pink buckets and donate 50 cents for every bucket sold to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Read more. Continue reading

New York Times—Intangible Dividend of Antipoverty Effort: Happiness by Sabrina Tavernise When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education. Read more. Continue reading

Today we feature Children of Americas. My sister told me about this cool organization for which doctors volunteer. Here is some information from its website. Children of the Americas, Inc. is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to providing medical and surgical services to indigent children and their families in rural Guatemala. Since 1987 the corporation has identified medical needs of patients through volunteer medical/surgical mission teams and by referrals from other agencies. The teams of volunteer staff provide medical, dental and surgical services on-site in Central America within the realm of our expertise. Read more. Continue reading

There is a neat Mexican place down the street from us that sells 99 cent tacos on Wednesdays. We went two weeks ago, and the cost for both of us was $6 without tip. We headed there this week, but unfortunately the place had some trouble with the grill so they were closed. With tacos on our minds, we needed to find another Mexican place. We learned how good our 99 cent taco deal was when we ended up spending $21 more this week. A simple meal of tacos became a meal of tacos (more expensive at this other place),... Continue reading