Playing For Change: Connecting The World Through Music

Changing the World through the universal language of music is the goal of "Playing for Change", a movement that started as a documentary about musicians from different countries and blossomed into a project that tries to use music to communicate a message of peace and understanding. Playing for Change gathers musicians from different levels and from all around the world (including Manu Chao, or U2 member Bono) in a joint effort to transmit their message and make a real change. Their efforts have been successful, and thanks to Youtube and internet social networks, what begun as a documentary is now a widely spread and well-known movement able to launch its own foundation. The Playing for Change Foundation has suffered an amazing expansion in its short life. They have programs in 5 countries (Nepal, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and Rwanda), teaching music to 600 students and have created 130 jobs... And they are still growing. Besides, their music videos are some of the most powerful and touching versions of songs I have ever heard, so I encourage you to take a look at their videos and I bet you will have a delightful time with their unique style and their awesome talent.

- David Nebreda

SOURCE: Playing For Change

TEDxChange Videos

TEDxChange is a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and TED sponsored initiative aiming to organize TED Talks-like events locally, so they can reach deeper into their communities. As other TED Talks, TEDxChange is recorded and shared with the world community, following their motto: "ideas worth spreading."

"In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event."

Check out their video gallery in search of ideas worth spreading to fight global poverty!

- David Nebreda

SOURCE: Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation

One for One

Throughout developing countries, many children do not have shoes to wear. Walking around barefoot, they get cuts and scrapes on their feet which often result in disease from parasites in the ground entering the wounded skin. In several cases, children cannot attend school where it is often a requirement to wear shoes. After seeing this problem with his own eyes during a trip to Argentina, Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in an effort to make a difference. For every pair of shoes that they sell, the company provides a pair for a needy child in a developing country. Since they started in 2006, TOMS was able to provide 140,000 children with shoes. In the next year, they are hoping to give 300,000 more. Find out more about TOMS here.

Passing through Hurdles to Help

Medair, a Swiss humanitarian agency, has recently been able to access areas in Southern Sudan to aid the remote tribes devastated by measles. Because of the rainy season, they were unable to help out last November, since getting there requires a 1-3 day walk through forests and mountains. To reach one tribe, they had to swim through a river and float their equipment on cooking vessels. After travelling through treacherous conditions, they were able to vaccinate a total of about 1,200 children. With no roads, health posts, schools, or markets near their tribes, people were very happy to see Medair come and help out.
Source: Reuters AlertNet

Peanut Butter Business

A group of four women in Zimbabwe decided that buying peanuts from local farmers and grinding them into butter would not only provide them with a great business opportunity, but it would give their community access to a cheaper source of the nutritious supplement. Starting a business in a developing country is difficult for numerous reasons, but this didn't stop the group of entrepreneurs. With the help of Practical Action, they were able to write a business plan and take out a loan. They quickly made a profit to repay the loan, and this enabled them to grow and get better equipment. Thanks to their new peanut butter business, these four women have financial stability, savings, and can now provide a better quality of life for their families.
Source: Practical Action

UN's Newest Goodwill Ambassador

The United Nations World Health Organization recently named martial arts expert Jet Li as its Goodwill Ambassador. Having experienced the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the actor has been committed to improving global disaster relief. According to Margaret Chan, the agency's Director-General, "[Li] has been personally involved in providing emergency response following natural disasters and has promoted mental health amongst youth. We are grateful that he is willing to use his energy and fame to promote health and well-being."
Source: UN News Centre

The actor's commitment to global disaster relief

More Than Just One Good Cause

The first CarbonFree® Certified water on the market, NIKA water, is also the first to donate 100% of their profits to charities who provide clean drinking water to impoverished areas around the world. The certification was awarded after a rigorous assessment of the water's manufacturing process, distribution and consumption. NIKA has also pledged that for every bottle sold, they will take a bottle out of the environment and recycle it.

According to the company's co-founder, Jeff Church, “If we can shift just 1 percent of the annual consumption of bottled water to NIKA we would be able to donate more than $2 million per year to the impoverished world. Thus, even a small shift of bottled water consumers to NIKA will help make significant inroads around the world toward cleaner water and sanitation.”

Learn more about NIKA here.
Source: PR.com

Chocolate on a Mission

Kuapa Kokoo is a co-op of cocoa farmers in Ghana, set up in the early 1990s. By pooling their resources, farmers were able to gain control of trading their own cocoa, managing the selling process more efficiently than government cocoa agents. One important aspect they oversee is measuring the crops, making sure that the scales aren't rigged at the expense of the farmer. In 1997, they decided to set up their own chocolate company to create even more benefits for cocoa growers. Divine Chocolate is now the most popular fair-trade certified chocolate in the UK, and it was recently introduced to the US. With a mission to empower their farmers to improve their livelihoods, Kuapa Kokoo has used its success to invest in building schools, digging wells for clean drinking water, providing mobile clinics for farmers in remote villages, and creating projects to help women earn money for their families when the cocoa season is over.

Studying Poverty

At UC Berkeley, students from all areas of study are signing up for the university's fastest growing minor, "Global Poverty and Practice". The program became available just 2 years ago, and it gives students the knowledge and experience necessary to fight global poverty. The minor's signature course, "Global Poverty: Challenges & Hopes in the New Millennium," fills up an auditorium of 480 people, with a waiting list of about 200 other interested students. As the program expands even further, maybe other universities across the country will notice, and begin establishing similar areas of study.
Source: UC Berkeley News

Microfinance Helps Individuals

The December 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, destroyed thousands of lives and left many people without a home or a job. Yuli's family was one of the few who lived through the ordeal, but were left with nearly nothing. After the tsunami, Yuli opened up a small kiosk to sell baked goods made by other local women, while her husband struggled to earn money as a driver. When she heard about the Grameen Foundation, she took out a loan for $100 with which she was able to buy more goods to sell, and thus increase her daily profit. She is now quickly on her way to repaying the loan, with plans to take out a bigger one later to build a bigger shop. With the help of the loan, she was able to improve her family's situation, keep her children in school, and start saving up money for a house.
Source: Grameen Foundation

Children Participate in Literacy Campaign

Send My Friend to School is a campaign throughout schools in the UK that aims to hold its government accountable for the millennium promise to send every child to school. 75 million children around the world do not have access to education, and while this is a big improvement from the 100 million in 2005, the number is still too high. This year, the campaign is focusing on The Big Read, an event involving young people from 100 different countries. Students are encouraged to write stories and poems underlining the importance of improving literacy for every child in the world, sending those stories to their prime minister.
Learn more.

The Blue Sweater

Earlier this month the Acumen Fund announced the release of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, by Acumen's CEO and founder, Jacqueline Novogratz. On a trip to Rwanda, Novgoratz came across a young boy wearing a pullover, with her name still on the tag, eleven years after she donated it to a Goodwill in Virginia, an incident which inspired her to write this memoir. The goal of the book is, in the words of the author, "to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty."

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Gordon Brown Speaks to Congress

Addressing the US Congress last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke about our responsibility to help the helpless. He challenged the wealthy to change their priorities, aiding those in poverty before addressing their own needs.

"At their best, our values tell us that we cannot be wholly content while others go without, cannot be fully comfortable while millions go without comfort, cannot be truly happy while others grieve alone. And this too is true. All of us know that in a recession the wealthiest, the ten most powerful and the most privileged can find a way through for themselves.

So we do not value the wealthy less when we say that our first duty is to help the not so wealthy. We do not value the powerful less when we say that our first responsibility is to help the powerless. And we do not value those who are secure less when we say that our first priority must be to help the insecure."

Full text of the speech here.