Sunday School Teachers and Philanthropy

     Remember Mark Twain’s gem about Tom Sawyer and the Sunday School superintendent?  Tom traded fishhooks and licorice for a fistful of blue, yellow, and red tickets, which together alleged Tom’s mastery of two thousand Bible verses.  The superintendent, startled but on the spot in front of visiting celebrity, awarded Tom a new Bible and no small glory in recognition of his “achievement.”  Unfortunately, Tom proceeded to demonstrate the quality of his work by naming the first two disciples as “David and Goliath!” 

     Twain loved to lampoon pompous windbags, and God knows that Sunday Schools have harbored more than a few.  I’d like to take a moment, however, to praise the good ones, and I have specific reasons that have nothing to do with theology. 

     Research shows that a good Sunday School teacher is an exceptionally valuable commodity.  He or she can do at least two very constructive things for children.  It turns out that one hour or more of religious study per week correlates positively with academic and emotional success in children.  Right there, a good Sunday School teacher is worth a lot, regardless of your denominational leanings.  If you count yourself among their ranks, I hope your chest is beginning to swell with a permissible degree of pride. 

     Research also shows that a good Sunday School teacher does at least one other good thing for kids, though this one isn’t limited to teachers: they can use their time to care.  When children can name at least three adults other than their parents who genuinely care for them, they tend to succeed much more readily in school and in life than kids who lack such adults in their lives.  Those adults can be neighbors, aunts, uncles, Scout leaders, or any adult who has the child’s best interests at heart. 

     How do I know this?  The Search Institute in Minneapolis has spent years pulling together a great deal of research that shows how children succeed.  They’ve come up with forty developmental ‘assets’ that all children need in order to thrive.  Half are things that the community must provide, meaning the family, the school, the church, or the neighborhood.  The other half are values and habits that children must develop for themselves, such as achievement motivation, integrity, cultural competence, and a sense of purpose.  You can download a summary of the Forty Assets at your United Way of Central Louisiana website, www.uwcl.org. 

     As with most research, some of the findings are entirely predictable.  What’s the number one most important asset a child can have?  It’s a loving family, of course.  That correlates more with child success than any other single asset. 

     The great tragedy of our children’s lives, however, is the research revealing that most children in the U.S. get fewer than half the assets they need to succeed.  Children who fail in life affect all of us.  A child who fails to grow up successfully becomes the surly store clerk, the incompetent mechanic, or the destructive supervisor.  You and I need every child in central Louisiana to succeed, whether or not we have children of our own. 

     Children need dependable grownups who are there for them consistently.  It matters how much time we spend with them.  It matters whether children see us smiling or shouting, reading or scolding.  It doesn’t matter nearly so much what you know or whether you have all the answers to childhood questions. 

     A caring Sunday School teacher matters.  Regular schoolteachers, shopkeepers and neighbors ~ how we relate to each other’s children matters. 

     Whatever your profession, however you spend your time off, do yourself and the rest of us a favor.  Find a child and spend a few years convincing that child that you care.  Be honest.  Be kind.  But be there. 

     Just watch out for the yellow tickets. 

Change Happens

Here’s a link to a five-minute video about the increasing rate of change in our world.  It will blow your mind. 

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/video/shifthappens

Compassion by the Numbers

Once again, Nicholas Kristof has found hard numbers to back up what old hands sort of knew: people don’t get motivated to help other people by statistics.  In rigorous research, people were much more likely to give money to a single person ~ preferably a child ~ than to wrestle with the implications of systemic poverty.  Put that way, it’s not surprising. 

He points out that many of us in “the biz”, however, work hard to develop numbers in order to make a case for giving.  And there are those funders like United Way and foundations that do insist on having a persuasive case to give.  (My point, not Nick’s.)

But most individuals are hard-wired to respond to individual cases, not to global issues.  So people who refuse to give to United Way at the office will dump their change into the jar at the cash register with a picture of a little girl and the words “Please Help!” 

Someone, of course, including people like Kristof, has to put the numbers together.  Someone has to understand the big picture and figure out how to move the rest of us to action.  But we have to be able to speak at least two languages ~ the abstract and the concrete. 

Savings for the Poor

There’s an interesting article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “Can Poor People Be Taught To Save?”  I admit, my first reaction was a bit negative.  I’ve caught myself too many times making condescending assumptions about ‘the poor.’  But the article provides good food for thought. 

As a middle-aged, would-be do-gooder, I’m struck by the creative ways that people are finding today to make a real difference in people’s lives, as opposed to simply starting up a new agency or a new program.  A lot of them are focusing on giving people a financial hand up so that they can stay their on their own. 

In the early 1980s, an Indian friend named Mohandas Mohanty asked me to serve on the board of an orphanage he was planning to start back in India, after he finished seminary.  I agreed, as did a dozen or so others.  We had the best of intentions, but at that time it was unbelievably difficult for a group such as ours to get financial or in-kind support to the orphanage.  I remember one box of supplies came back to me fully two years after I mailed it, looking for all the world as though an elephant had stepped on it before the Indian postman sent it back.  

The effort failed.  The logistics were just too difficult.  I finally lost touch with Mohanty and his wife Bulbul somewhere along the way.   

Today I can microfinance a bakery while drinking coffee in my pajamas.  Science fiction stuff only yesterday.  Let’s see what we can do with the new options at our disposal. 

Everyday Philanthropy

Nonprofits today are undergoing a sea change.  People are figuring out new ways of doing things to make real differences, rather than simply supporting organizations.   

Today’s column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times tells of an exciting use of technology that allows average folks in the U.S., and I include myself in that category, to assist people around the world.  It’s a website that allows me to lend $25, if I want to, to a baker in Afghanistan so he can expand to a second shop.  

Here’s Kristof’s column ~ I couldn’t figure out which parts to leave out:

You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KABUL, Afghanistan

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier.

That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.

So on my arrival here in Afghanistan, I visited my new business partners to see how they were doing.

On a muddy street in Kabul, Abdul Satar, a bushy-bearded man of 64, was sitting in the window of his bakery selling loaves for 12 cents each. He was astonished when I introduced myself as his banker, but he allowed me to analyze his business plan by sampling his bread: It was delicious.

Mr. Abdul Satar had borrowed a total of $425 from a variety of lenders on Kiva.org, who besides me included Nathan in San Francisco, David in Rochester, N.Y., Sarah in Waltham, Mass., Nate in Fort Collins, Colo.; Cindy in Houston, and “Emily’s family” in Santa Barbara, Calif.

With the loan, Mr. Abdul Satar opened a second bakery nearby, with four employees, and he now benefits from economies of scale when he buys flour and firewood for his oven. “If you come back in 10 years, maybe I will have six more bakeries,” he said.

Mr. Abdul Satar said he didn’t know what the Internet was, and he had certainly never been online. But Kiva works with a local lender affiliated with Mercy Corps, and that group finds borrowers and vets them.

The local group, Ariana Financial Services, has only Afghan employees and is run by Storai Sadat, a dynamic young woman who was in her second year of medical school when the Taliban came to power and ended education for women. She ended up working for Mercy Corps and becoming a first-rate financier; some day she may take over Citigroup.

“Being a finance person is better than being a doctor,” Ms. Sadat said. “You can cure the whole family, not just one person. And it’s good medicine — you can see them get better day by day.”

Small loans to entrepreneurs are now widely recognized as an important tool against poverty. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his pioneering work with microfinance in Bangladesh.

In poor countries, commercial money lenders routinely charge interest rates of several hundred percent per year. Thus people tend to borrow for health emergencies rather than to finance a new business. And partly because poor people tend to have no access to banks, they also often can’t save money securely.

Microfinance institutions typically focusing on lending to women, to give them more status and more opportunities. Ms. Sadat’s group does lend mostly to women, but it’s been difficult to connect some female borrowers with donors on Kiva — because many Afghans would be horrified at the thought of taking a woman’s photograph, let alone posting on the Internet.

My other partner in Kabul is Abdul Saboor, who runs a small TV repair business. He used the loan to open a second shop, employing two people, and to increase his inventory of spare parts. “I used to have to go to the market every day to buy parts,” he said, adding that it was a two-and-a-half-hour round trip. “Now I go once every two weeks.”

Web sites like Kiva are useful partly because they connect the donor directly to the beneficiary, without going through a bureaucratic and expensive layer of aid groups in between. Another terrific Web site in this area is www.globalgiving.com, which connects donors to would-be recipients. The main difference is that GlobalGiving is for donations, while Kiva is for loans.

A young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, founded Kiva after they worked in Africa and realized that a major impediment to economic development was the unavailability of credit at any reasonable cost.

“I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t efficient,” Mr. Flannery said. He added: “This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”

Kristof is a great columnist to follow for those who are interested in making the world a better place, everyday. 

Hello world!

Some younger friends have inspired me by starting an intelligent dialogue on creating a better world in central Louisiana.  Two of them are actually in Tibet at the moment, but that just goes to show that Central Louisiana is important all over the world.  We’ll see whether I have anything to contribute to the conversation.  Stay tuned as I bring my blogging skills slowly up to date.