The Give Blog

Myths about the Poor

Bill and Melinda Gates discuss three myths about the poor.

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304149404579324530112590864?mobile=y

A Child's Homeless Life

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.

Microcredit in US

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.

The Happiest Countries and Income

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

"The Crazy Cash-Giveaway Experiment"

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." 

Influencing Each Other to Give

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

Good Work in Guatemala City

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

The Worst Charities

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

Learn More About Giving

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.

 

A Different Way to Think About Charities

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

Can We End Poverty?

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.

Hunger Persists in the Philippines

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.

Head of World Bank Talks about Poverty

Wall Street Journal—Fighting Poverty In Times of Crisis

 

 

 

On the Ground—Safe Passage

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.

A Gap in Words

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.