Guest Blog: An example for high schools (and others) to follow

The following blog was contributed by: Gal Ben-Yair, Gali Shilo, Shir Adomi, Aviv Bronkhorst, Elad Argaman, Oxana Bardesky and Liad Kalush


My Brothers and Sisters in the Least Developed World is an educational program for affluent high school students, which strives to foster empathy and a profound understanding of the way in which the world is managed. It also seeks to foster students' willingness to act for the benefit of people living in the poor world (Richardson, 1979; Davies, 2006; Oxfam, 2006).

The persistent harsh reality in many developing countries poses the question: Do affluent high school students care about the state of the one-fifth of the global population that lives in absolute poverty and suffers from chronic malnutrition? Would they be more caring if they learned about it?

An educational study is currently seeking to address these questions. In the course of the study, 11th and 12th grade students are taught a curriculum that uses statistics and visual aids to describe the current situation. In addition, the curriculum also touches upon some of the global economic mechanisms that exacerbate the poverty of the least developed world.

At the end of the learning phase, the students are given the opportunity to voluntarily participate in a practical phase. This component of the course enables students to present the information they learned in order to promote awareness and to raise funds.

The Pilot Stage

During the school year (2008-2009), a pilot test was conducted with students of nine classes at four different high schools in Israel.

Of the 283 students who participated in the pilot stage, 114 (40% of the students) asked to participate in the practical phase. That means a rate of 40% voluntary participation – 40% of the young people were moved and outraged enough to decide not to stand aside.

The students who participate in the practical stage present a one-hour presentation to adults and peers in other classes. Their presentation consists of the three following sections:

A. A vivid description of the harsh conditions in which people in the poor world are living, underlined by statistics on the subject. They present among other things the number of people who are living on the purchasing power of $1.25 or less per day, the number of children and adults suffering from chronic malnutrition, the number of children who are forced into labor and the figures about child-trafficking;
B. A description of the three main global economic mechanisms currently exacerbating the poverty of people living in the least developed countries: Foreign debts, harmful trade, and a consistent erosion in the Official Development Assistance that the rich countries committed to in a U.N. resolution from 1970;
C. Presenting the audience with the question: Is our humanity today strong and wealthy enough to significantly improve the situation within two decades? The students then present the UN Millennium Development Program and its accurate figures, which prove its relatively low costs in comparison to the developed world's annual income.

As part of their awareness promoting activity, the students raise funds for two causes:

1. Finance children's nourishment through the World Food Programme;
2. Support children's schooling through UNICEF.

Here are links to essays written by two students describing their experience.
(1 and
2)

Here you can see as well some photos of students during presentation.

One of the study's main goals is to develop a curriculum that will serve formal educational organizations in the affluent world. The U.N. emphasizes the need in these kinds of curricula (UNESCO, UNHCHR: World Programme for Human Rights Education – Plan of Action. 2006)


For more information please contact Liad Kalush whose idea the program was and who coordinates it.

Photos needed for The Life You Can Save website

We are redesigning The Life You Can Save website, and we want to use photos of people who have pledged to meet the standards for giving to those in extreme poverty.

If you have pledged, and are willing to be featured on the website, please send us a photo, along with a line or two about who you are and why you decided to pledge.

We need colored photos - the more colorful the better - that are at least 600 x 400 pixels, and in shape they should be wider than they are high. They may show only you, or you and your partner or your family, and of course if you happen to have any taken when you were visiting a developing country and looking at a project to help those in extreme poverty, that would be even better.

In sending us your photo, you will be warranting that all people shown in the photo consent to have their image put on the internet (or that in the case of children, the parents or guardians consent.)

If we receive many photos, we will make a selection and run those we judge suitable at different times, so not all photos will be on display at all times.

Please email your photo or photos to thelifeyoucansave@gmail.com

Thanks!

Peter Singer

Another way to decide how much to give

Here's an interesting idea from Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer working with Google.org. He writes:

***

I am trying an experiment I call "personal consumption offsets" (http://wolog.net/254527.html):

In 2010, I'll match everything I spend on a non-essential purchase
with an equal donation to an effective charity.

I think there is a good chance that this method may have both practical
and psychological benefits:

1. Anybody can apply this plan, regardless of income.

2. The statement of the pledge is simple and does not involve
choosing arbitrary numbers.

3. I will make more total donations than by pledging 5% of my income.

4. It will motivate me to donate more to charity (because it means
more enjoyment for myself).

5. It will enhance my enjoyment of the things I buy for myself
(because I will know that it also benefits others).

If you like this idea, please consider passing it on

****

I like it, so I'm passing it on. It resembles, to some extent, the idea behind www.whatIdidnotbuy.org, which is also worth a look.

I have only one tiny cavil. In his blog, Ka-Ping Yee describes this as an alternative to take the pledge that I have invited people to take, at www.thelifeyoucansave.com. But why not do both? If you give in this way, then unless you have an extremely high income, or spend almost nothing on non-essential items [or both - but that is unlikely} you will exceed the pledge level. And taking the pledge spreads the message to others - it helps them to see that many people are giving significantly to those in extreme poverty.

Special Guest Blog: How Students Can Support a Millennium Village?

Reading The Life You Can Save I got pretty excited and with good reason I think too. Last year at Carleton University our group, Students To End Extreme Poverty, worked to get a question to referendum where students voted on whether or not they would all have to automatically pay an additional $6 in tuition fees ($5352 instead of $5346) to help support a Millennium Village. It worked. Carleton students now contribute over $110,000 annually.

Here is our hope: By getting enough universities and organizations to support Millennium Villages (aside from helping a couple communities help themselves out of extreme poverty) it would raise enough awareness, get enough media attention, engage enough people, foster enough cooperation, and generate enough civil society will to see policy changes: more and better aid, fairer trade, and debt cancellation.

Worst case scenario: thousands of people, many of whom would otherwise be dead, will have the basic tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

Just like professor Singer pointed out, if we remove the barriers to involvement and giving – people can always opt out if they don’t like it – the great majority of people will stay involved in alleviating global poverty and be happy they did with ”the right kind of nudge”. Facilitating institutionalized giving of 1% of people’s incomes could easily generate enough money to make a massive impact on some of the worst effects of extreme poverty and send a clear message to our governments: act now to end world poverty. Norway even gives 1% as a country.

Institutions and their employees don’t usually do this for global poverty. They can; it’s just that oodles of people haven’t leapt at the opportunity to make it happen. Efforts like these can be going on in a variety of fashions across the world. In Canada alone there are 18 million people in the labor force with nearly 4.5 million people in unions. Over two million of those unionized workers are in nine unions. That’s not a logistical nightmare to try and make happen. Want to make a difference? Opportunities like this abound.

What have we got to lose in going for it? Especially if it’s benefiting a stellar organization like Millennium Promise or Oxfam where the money is spent transparently, where there are monitorable objectives and where it is making a demonstrable difference in people’s lives one person or one community at a time.

This is something that we as a global community can run with. There are numerous ideas like these that with little time produce results thousands of times the size of the effort they take. There are a number of us working on similar initiatives so please get in touch if you want to help. James Grant said “the problem is not that we have tried to eradicate global poverty and failed; the problem is that no serious and concerted attempt has ever been made”. Sadly it’s true; however on the plus side, there really has never been a better time to make poverty history.

Bryan Turner
Youth Engagement Coordinator
Make Poverty History Canada
www.makepovertyhistory.ca

Going Multinational

The Life You Can Save is becoming a truly multinational website. It is now available in 12 languages, including Chinese, with more translations on the way. And the 3346 people who have pledged to give a percentage of their income to help the world's poor come from 59 countries! We have a new map, courtesy of Google, that shows which countries have the most people pledging (although you need to move down to the more detailed level to get this accurately, as at the global level the map groups several countries together). Here's the list of countries from which people have pledged:

Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Australia
Bahamas
Bahrain
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Korea, Republic of
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Malta
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Senegal
Singapore
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam

Of course, we'd like to get pledges from even more countries. Russians, where are you? As for the number of pledges, they are still moving up steadily, but please spread the word, and remember that everyone who pledges is setting an example for others to follow and helping to change the culture about giving.

Translating the website

We are looking for native speakers of a variety of languages who are willing to volunteer to translate the text of the website (www.thelifeyoucansave.com) into as many languages as possible. We started with Swedish and have Russian, Polish, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Chinese both simplified and traditional, Dutch, Romanian, Tagalog Filipino, Danish, Korean and Japanese now. We also have volunteers for Catalan, Lithuanian, Slovenian and probably Arabic. If you are a native speaker of a language not included in this list, and can spare the time to translate a few pages of text, please email us at thelifeyoucansave@gmail.com. Thanks!

Giving More - gradually

After a talk I gave at the London School of Economics yesterday, one person told me that he'd begun giving a few years ago, starting at 1/% of his income, as the website (www.thelifeyoucansave.com) recommends for 90% of taxpayers, but increasing this by an additional 1% each year. That's an easy way to build up slowly - and especially if you are young, as this person was, it's going to mean that in a few years you will be giving a significant amount, but not in a way that ever causes a shock to your budget. Worth thinking about.

Peter Singer