Plant With Purpose is a San Diego-based Christian development organization. It assists the impoverished living in rural areas “where poverty and environmental degradation intersect” globally.
Through agricultural training, restoring the land and providing financial education, Plant With Purpose helps poor farming families become self-sufficient. To date, they have helped plant 11.9 million trees since their founding in 1984.
Plant With Purpose is currently present in more than 325 communities, providing aid and support to over 17,132 individuals within Burundi, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Tanzania and Thailand.
Location: Davi, Haiti
The Need: In Haiti, only 2 percent of its original forestry remains. Eighty-four percent of the population lives in poverty, and the country imports 60 percent of its food needs. Half of Haitian children under 5 are undernourished. With the help of Plant With Purpose, smallholder farming families are planting trees, implementing soil conservation methods and preventing soil erosion. Locals are educated on sustainable agriculture methods that restore the land and increase their food production and incomes. Village Savings and Loan Associations are also implemented.
Instead of providing food aid, Plant With Purpose is educating for self-sufficiency.
The communities in Davi are facing particular hardships. Floods and landslides cause destruction every rainy season, washing away the fertile topsoil and preventing farmers from growing crops. Families are forced to migrate to cities to find work. Plant With Purpose is working to reverse deforestation through its various methodologies.
Progress: Assisted families showed a 46 percent decrease in cholera and a 50 percent decrease in typhoid, compared with others. They also now actively save cash four times more frequently. They cultivate about 20 percent more land, own 30 percent more land and protect 20 percent more land through reforestation or erosion control.
These families also plant about three times as many trees as non-assisted local families.
Location: Panasawan & Pang Dang Nok, Thailand
The Need: The government of Thailand refuses to recognize many hill tribe members as citizens. Thus, they have few legal rights. They also have limited access to healthy fields, leaving them to grow crops on devastated hillsides. Plant With Purpose has been working with these communities to help them learn sustainable farming techniques and advocate for legal status in Thailand.
The village of Panasawan suffers from extreme poverty and a destroyed environment. Soil erosion, poor water quality and sanitation, difficult access to land rights and lacking availability of credit has ensnared the community in the cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. Plant With Purpose is providing farmers with environmental and financial training and economic opportunities necessary to break the cycle.
Progress: Hill tribe farming families are gaining access to land and basic rights. Village Savings and Loan Associations are providing a means to save and gain credit. Plant With Purpose is also helping congregations better meet the needs of their communities by training leaders.
Families aided now have twice as many children enrolled in high school, are 31 percent more likely to actively save cash, are 41 percent more likely to own land that is protected, have planted 2.5 times more trees, have shown a 19 percent decrease in admitted gambling and are 20 percent more likely to eat meat, eggs or fish on a daily or weekly basis.
Location: Lyasongoro, Tanzania
The Need: In Tanzania, Plant With Purpose mainly works with women, many of whom are widows or single mothers, because women and children there represent the poorest segment of the communities. Roughly 98 percent of these women who work earn through agriculture, but because they don’t have access to the same training their male counterparts receive, their yields suffer.
Plant With Purpose provides agricultural training, which doubles crop output, and plants over a million trees each year around Mt. Kilimanjaro. They are also establishing Village Savings and Loan Associations.
Progress: Assisted families showed a 65 percent decrease in diarrheal disease and a 70 percent decrease in typhoid incidence. It’s also true that 99 percent of these families actively save cash, compared with 48 percent previously, and 50 percent have enough savings to cover household expenses for six months, compared with 6 percent previously.
Of participant families, 80 percent own cattle, which is 42 percent higher than those not assisted, and 66 percent of participants earn some household income through microenterprise endeavors, a significant 43 percent higher than those who were not trained.
Location: El Café, Dominican Republic
The Need: While the Dominican Republic is gaining wealth, there is a growing gap between the rich and poor. The most impoverished, deforested regions exist near the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The Dominican government relies on Plant With Purpose to help with their reforestation programs.
El Café mainly profits off of its oregano crop, but recent deforestation threatens this trade. Plant With Purpose is helping to replenish the soil and diversify their economy. The organization has started a nursery, growing seedlings, fruit trees and other plants to replenish the forests and provide an additional source of income. Plant With Purpose has also provided a solar drier to villagers to convert their oregano into a marketable good. They are also offering workshops teaching sustainable farming and land conservation methods.
Progress: Families who work with the organization own twice as much land and protect 75 percent more land than non-participant families. These households are 60 percent more likely to own cattle as well.
Cacao, a valuable cash crop, is harvested 30 percent more often by Plant With Purpose farmers than other locals. Assisted families have planted almost three times as many trees than before.
Location: Kiremba, Burundi
The Need: In the world’s hungriest country, 80 percent of Burundi’s 8.5 million people live below the poverty line. At least 90 percent of Burundians depend on agriculture, but their farmland has been devastated by deforestation, drought, war and over-farming. Plant With Purpose is helping these farmers access land and maximize their productivity. They are also working with agriculture research institutions to provide disease-resistant crops. Through the introduced Village Savings and Loan Associations, villagers are saving their money and providing loans to others.
Progress: Plant With Purpose reports that 95 percent of farmers in associations have shared their knowledge with other farmers; each farmer shares with an average of 23.5 people. Participants are 24 percent more likely to save cash than non-participants, have planted three times as many trees as non-participants and have harvested 31 different crops, compared with 20 crops harvested by non-participant farmers.
Location: Tamazola, Mexico
The Need: In Oaxaca and Chiapas, two of the poorest states in Mexico, more than 75 percent of indigenous people live in extreme poverty. As men migrate to find work elsewhere, women are frequently left to care for their children and households.
Plant With Purpose is teaching families in rural communities to plant vegetable gardens that will increase their food production and incomes. Village Savings and Loan Associations have also been established to provide financial security and opportunity.
Progress: Plant With Purpose reports that participant households actively save cash 68 percent of the time, while non-participants save cash only 45 percent of the time, with participants being 43 percent more likely to have enough savings to cover six months of needs. Seventy-seven percent of participants own cattle, compared with 51 percent of non-participants, with the number of cattle owned by participants being twice that of the number owned by non-participants. Only seven percent of participant households have dirt floors in their homes compared with 29 percent of non-participant households. Participant farmers harvested 22 different crops, compared with eight by non-participants.
Plant With Purpose has seen measurable success from its efforts, objectively putting donations to good use. If seeking an effective, Christian-based charity that assists the poor on the ground, look no further. Personal contributions can be guaranteed to yield maximal benefit in the hands of this organization.
– Elias Goodman
Sources: Charity Navigator, Plan with Purpose, Scribd
Photo: New Identity Magazine
Random Hacks of Kindness
Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is an inventive global initiative “involving over 6,000 innovators in more than 35 countries who make the world a better place by developing practical, open source technology solutions to some of the most complex challenges facing humanity.”
The initiative was created in 2009 when representatives from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! convened at a panel in Washington, D.C. to discuss ways in which technology could be used in the midst of global crises. Each of these top technology companies recognized the immense impact they could have if they stepped into the world of crisis management.
However, they needed a way to circumvent their usual competitiveness, a way to bring their employees together around a common goal.
Random Hacks of Kindness was the solution. The project aims to bring together expert volunteer employees and humanitarian leaders to create solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems. The World Bank and NASA, along with the aforementioned Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, became founding partners, creating an altogether outstanding mix of expertise in many different fields.
From the beginning, RHoK has stressed how important their specific method is to their success, a process which requires a significant amount of teamwork between different sectors. “The RHoK process — engaging with experts to define strong problem statements, collaborative rapid prototyping through hackathons and creating clears paths for the sustainability of effective solutions — enables the volunteer community of thousands to create impact through their efforts.”
The first step is to collect extremely detailed and well-defined problem statements from people in the field. Users from all over the world can submit descriptions of problems in their local communities to the RHoK website, allowing anyone anywhere to benefit from the talent of RHoK volunteers. These reports are then scrutinized by field professionals and are revised to best fit the sector’s needs.
Developers are the stars of the second step: global hackathons at which prototypes of possible solutions are created during coding-intensive weekends.
Unlike other organizations of its kind, Random Hacks of Kindness volunteer technologists are able to tackle global issues with help from field specialists. “Having an expert on hand at a hackathon to work with the teams and provide real-world experiences and knowledge is [an] invaluable piece of the puzzle when working to build a solution with realistic impact potential.”
The third step involves RHoK’s Sustainability Project, which aims to take the most promising prototypes created at the hackathons and successfully execute them. Through the initiative’s efforts, the prototypes are able to receive the proper funding and support needed to make them a reality.
Random Hacks of Kindness has worked with noteworthy humanitarian organizations like OXFAM and Amnesty International as well as small local communities. It is led by an intensely motivated volunteer community trying to make the world a better place through technology and teamwork.
“Using existing, and freely available, documentation of best practices, and empowering the community to further develop and iterate on them through community-led, individual and organizational initiatives, RHoK continues to remain at the forefront of creating impact through hacking for social good.”
– Emily Jablonski
Sources: Crisis Commons, Geeks Without Bounds, RHOK
Photo: Technical.ly
10 Quotes about Life
Presented here are 10 quotes about life and its values:
1. “The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
~Mitch Albom
2. “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
~Henry David Thoreau
3. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
~Aristotle
4. “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
~Ann Landers
5. “In the end, no thought is unthinkable, no problem unshrinkable, no two strangers unlinkable.”
~Robert Brault
6. “With patience you can even cook a stone.”
~Anonymous
7. “You can close your eyes to things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don’t want to feel.”
~Anonymous
8. “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”
~Anonymous
9. “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.”
~George Bernard Shaw
10. “The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As members of this society, we are challenged daily to remember inspirations like these and to value and respect the existence of every human life.
– Ashley Riley
Sources: motivationgrid 1, Quote Garden, Thinkexist, Brainy Quote 1, Brainy Quote 2, iz quotes, Flickr, Brainy Quote 3, Brainy Quote 4
Photo: Quantum Life Skills
WASProject: 3D Printers
The company WASProject is pursuing an innovative idea: it will develop materials to build homes by using 3D printing technology.
WASProject – which stands for “World’s Advanced Saving Project” – is based in Italy and has already produced an impressive line of distinct and advanced 3D printers.
However, the team now has even bigger dreams focused on impacting lives. The money accumulated from selling the previous printers was used to finance a bigger printer – created with the noble goal of providing housing to those living in developing nations.
The company’s main objective is, “to produce a big Delta Robot, capable of printing huge objects and use this machine to produce housing structures or housing modules, using natural materials such as clay, soil, natural powders, mixed with resin, etc,” said WASProject team member Sebastiano.
The Big Delta 3D printer already made its debut in 2013 at the Rome Maker Faire, which considers itself the “World’s Largest Show Festival” and is sponsored by Intel, the reputable semiconductor chip maker.
The basic goal of the Big Delta is to produce building material for houses made of clay. The building material is created by inserting a mixture of soil, water and oil into the printer in order to print out the pieces of clay housing structure.
The Big Delta is incredibly versatile. It will not necessarily be confined to printing the same housing structures, and therefore, can prevent the creation of a monotonous and dull neighborhood of tract houses in these developing countries.
In developing areas, such as Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeastern Asia, many families live in poor conditions, with little or no access to energy or sanitation. These areas are often also affected by floods and landslides.
With new technology and social inventions, devices like the Big Delta can be utilized to address these issues of sustainable housing that millions of people throughout the world face.
A properly established housing structure serves as a launching pad to address other pressing issues. For instance, after the problem of housing is dealt with, the issue of proper sanitary structure can be implemented, including access to latrines and clean water.
The Big Delta has the potential to improve the economy of a region by providing work to the citizens to boost the demand for labor. While the printer only prints structures, human hands are needed to piece them together to build the homes.
– Christina Cho
Sources: WASProject, 3DPrint
Photo: Wikipedia
Causes of Malaria
Malaria, a disease largely eliminated in the developed world, remains a health issue for developing nations. According to World Health Organization estimates, 207 million cases of the deadly disease emerged in 2012 alone, with about 80 percent coming from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
To help communities in these nations fight malaria, NGOs and foreign aid providers must not only provide malaria treatment methods but also find ways to address and protect people from its causes.
So, what are the causes of malaria?
The Mayo Clinic identifies the main path to infection as the transmission of parasites through mosquitoes. Mosquitoes can carry small parasites that cause malaria, and when they bite humans the parasites can enter the bloodstream. Once in the body, the malarial parasites travel to the liver, where they grow and develop. The maturation process lasts from a week to nearly a year, but once the parasites reach adulthood, they enter the bloodstream and infect red blood cells.
At this stage, the common symptoms of malaria, including fever, chills and sweating, develop. At the same time, mosquitoes that suck infected blood will get the malarial parasites, allowing them to spread through bites to other people.
Though malaria primarily spreads through mosquito bites, people can contract it from other sources. Malaria is a blood-borne disease, and receiving blood transfusions from infected individuals can lead to transmission. Sharing dirty hypodermic needles will also cause malaria to spread, and mothers can pass the disease on to their unborn children.
If left untreated within 24 hours of the first symptoms, malaria can cause brain damage, fluid buildup in the lungs and liver failure, all of which can be fatal. The World Health Organization believes that in 2012 malaria killed 627,000 people, the majority of whom were African children under five.
Fortunately, the mortality rates of malaria have fallen 42 percent globally since 2000. Still, the disease is lethal enough that a child in Africa dies every minute from malaria-related symptoms.
With no existing vaccine for the disease, programs to reduce deaths must focus on preventing malaria and safely treating existing cases.
Knowing that mosquitoes are the primary transmitters of malarial parasites, what do governments and other organizations do to prevent bites?
According to the World Health Organization, the two primary methods to keep mosquitoes away from people and their homes are to use insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying of insecticides.
Projects from NGOs and foreign aid agencies to provide these services to communities free of charge will help prevent mosquitoes from spreading malaria.
While using either insecticide-treated nets or indoor residual spraying to stop mosquito bites is effective, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that, in areas of medium transmission, using both methods reduced the risk of infection an extra 36 percent compared to one method alone.
Public education programs to teach people and doctors not to reuse medical equipment, not to give transfusions of infected blood and how to recognize symptoms quickly can also supplement insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying to stop malaria at its source.
Malaria is a dangerous disease that takes the lives of many young children daily, but since people know what causes malaria, it can be prevented. Thanks to technology to kill parasite-carrying mosquitoes, deaths from malaria are dropping and the world is becoming a safer place to live.
– Ted Rappleye
Sources: The Mayo Clinic, World Health Organization, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
Photo: TreeHugger
Six Ways to Improve Land & Food Security
The green revolution was a period of agricultural revolution that increased food production in the mid-twentieth century. It showed that a global effort can enlarge and develop food systems with new techniques and technology transfers. Lately, with rapid population growth, increasing food prices and climate change, there have been calls for a second green revolution. Here are a few ways that this revolution can be jump-started.
1. Land is at the center of these food security problems.
While the relationship between people and the Earth has changed immensely, land remains an essential piece to the puzzle. Nate Kline, of the Enabling Agriculture Trade project at Fintrac, said he cannot think of another sector that is more tied to the land. “Land is the chief, primary input in all agricultural production,” he said.
2. More people live in urban areas than rural areas now.
Consequently, cities have to be connected to food distribution cycles that are reliable and can supply food to numbers of people at a dependable rate.
3. The method of organizing land will determine the answers to questions about future food security.
The way international organizations, communities, nations and families decide on organizing land, which will secure land rights and land ownership claims, will be important in answering questions about a food-secure future.
4. Food security is also about how the agricultural sector can become a more dependable way of income for people in rural areas.
The income of the poor is closely related to growth in the agricultural sector. Food security programs usually pursue raising incomes of those in poverty. When land users feel secure that their land will be in their possession however long they want to keep it, then they are more likely to finance the long-term development of their resources and land.
5. Food security often come with better land-use choices.
Conserving water and soil nutrients instead of exhausting resources will make food more secure for the future. It can also mean landholders are keener on paying the costs of equipment and fertilizers which can lead to higher incomes and more profitable crops.
6. When families sell more and better food, those yields generate income to spend for household food needs.
There is a direct connection between the access to land and willingness to make investments that may eventually pay off. With more money from profitable and nutritious crops, families have the option to invest in their nutrition as well as use the money from the crops to buy better equipment and use better management techniques. Food should be nutritious, affordable and part of a sustainable system.
In order to ensure food security, the world will need to engage with a comprehensive set of actors and work with numerous sectors.
– Colleen Moore
Sources: Devex 1, Devex 2
Photo: Eco Tope
The State of World Affairs
Following a methodological review of great transformations in the past 500 years, Professor Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge University advances that we are at the brink of another “great event.” Boyle’s prognosis is the result of establishing a correlation between “great events” that took place in the second decade of each of the last five centuries and our current state of world affairs.
In 1517, it was The Reformation of churches and the rise of Protestantism. 1618 marked the beginning of the 30 years war and decades of religious unrest in Western Europe. In 1715, the Hanoverian and British rule were established. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna took place, and thus began decades of relative peace. In 1914, Wold War I began. Today, the end of one of the worst financial crises to date may mark the beginning of another “great event.”
In light of these events, Boyle claims that “the character of a century becomes very apparent in that second decade,” later adding, “so why should ours be any different?” This argument establishes a strong correlation between chronology and world events. However, is this sufficient enough to make such a drastic claim about world affairs?
According to Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia (1988-1996) and President of the International Crisis Group, there is certainly a wide array of events that point to a breakdown in the international system. However, as bad as things seem, they are not bad enough to warrant a doomsday event.
Evans gives several reasons why we should not lose our sleep over the state of current world affairs. First, we are not really at the brink of another world war. While countries like the U.S., China and Russia are periodically competing and sometimes refuse to cooperate, they are widely integrated and dependent on each other for progress. In regard to each country’s desire for influence, Evans adds, “they want greater influence in international institutions, not to overturn them.”
Second, the decline of U.S. influence is not a matter for concern. In the big picture, great imperial powers are bound to slow down at some point, especially when there are other powerful and developed countries. This brings forth a third reason: the struggle for influence does not have to take a military form. While exercising dominance will continue to be something countries compete for, the way in which this takes place can be as much a matter of cooperation as of coercion.
It is undeniable that stability in the international system is a moving target. However, alarmism only leads to further pessimism. As a society, we have learned from past mistakes, and we must acknowledge the fact that the international system has become much more effective in solving problems.
– Sahar Abi Hassan
Sources: Project Syndicate, Daily Mail
Photo: Baylor
Rebels in Northern Mali Threaten Region’s Stability
The slow and steady recovery that Mali experienced after the extended Islamist occupation by the Tuaregs in the north was recently thrown into jeopardy. A handful of recent clashes between separatist rebels and government forces have begun to increase insecurity and hamper the effectiveness of aid efforts in the area.
What’s worse is that parts of the country have even fallen back into rebel hands.
While some displaced people have begun returning to their homes in the north, many still worry about their safety and security. Some of those who have returned even had to flee again due to rebel activity in their community.
“Tensions within communities and concerns of retribution mean people do not feel safe to return home,” said Erin Weir, Protection and advocacy advisor with the Norwegian Refugee Council. “That the constant power shifts – one day an area belongs to the rebels, the other day it is back in government hands – means people might feel secure one minute, the next they are inclined to flee again.”
This ongoing crisis with rebels in Northern Mali is often ignored by the public as other issues receive more coverage from media outlets. Yet, staff members of the Red Cross were attacked in the area earlier this year, which resulted in the stoppage of food distribution to the regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu. This left 11 percent of the population, or 1.9 million people, in need of food assistance.
Similar attacks have also interrupted food distribution by the World Food Program.
Just under 250,000 people in the north are considered food insecure, and approximately two-thirds of those people are defined as in ‘crisis.’ This is only worsened by the fact that operations in Mali are underfunded by one-third.
“The recent fighting has set back the humanitarian situation and deepened the crisis,” Weir said. “Services in the north are still restricted and access to health care, education and markets are limited, not to mention food insecurity that is affected by recent displacement.”
While there are countless other humanitarian crises taking place around the world, the world cannot forget those that still haven’t been completely resolved.
While progress might be slow, the recent conflicts with rebels in Northern Mali only show how long and hard the road to recovery is. Further work is needed in order to ensure that the hard-won progress is not lost.
– Andre Gobbo
Sources: IRIN, The Economist, The Guardian
Photo: AlJazeera
Childhood Poverty and Emotional Problems
Over the years, numerous studies have demonstrated the damaging effects of childhood poverty on development. Recent testing helps to unravel how growing up poor causes psychological problems.
The human brain grows the most during the first few years of life. It has been discovered that children from poorer homes are more likely to have psychological disorders in their adult lives. To explain the correlation between poverty and psychological problems, one theory suggests that exposure to high amounts of stress during this early critical time permanently hinders an individual’s ability to cope with stress.
Testing done by Professor K. Luan Phan supports this notion. During her study, scientists examined the brain function of 24-year-old individuals, whose family situations had already been recorded 15 years prior. The participants were asked to try and control negative emotions while looking at a series of pictures.
The ability to suppress and manage feelings is key to helping individuals deal with the stress of life.
From the tests, researchers were able to conclude that the individuals who were the most impoverished at 9 years old scored the lowest on the exams as 24-year-olds. Even if the subject’s living conditions improved over the years, childhood poverty proved the dominating factor for test performance.
The findings connect childhood poverty to a lower ability to control one’s emotions. This connection supports the notion that the high-stress situation of living in poverty as a child directly affects an individual’s ability to handle strains in their adult life.
Other research done by the Washington University School of Medicine helps to explain the phenomena in a more anatomical sense. Their study showed that the psychological effects of childhood poverty are likely connected to smaller brain volumes in areas associated with emotion processing and memory. The researchers examined brain scans of children between the ages of 6 to 12, whose family history had been previously recorded.
From the scans, scientists found that the stress of poverty physically changes a child’s brain; those living in impoverished homes had smaller volumes of white and cortical gray matter. These white and gray areas are associated with the part of the brain that is associated with communication, as well as sensory and emotions. A small amount of matter in this area of the brain suggests that those functions are hampered.
So, childhood poverty has a visible effect on the brain, which reflects an impairment of emotion processing.
Though both studies are still in the testing phase, the connection drawn between childhood poverty and its lasting effects on mental development is alarming. According to UNICEF, over 22,000 children die everyday because of poverty.
Seeing the permanent damage poverty causes to childhood development highlights its severity and the critical need to address it.
– Kathleen Egan
Sources: Spring, US News, Global Issues
Photo: Portside
Six Successes of Plant With Purpose Around the World
Plant With Purpose is a San Diego-based Christian development organization. It assists the impoverished living in rural areas “where poverty and environmental degradation intersect” globally.
Through agricultural training, restoring the land and providing financial education, Plant With Purpose helps poor farming families become self-sufficient. To date, they have helped plant 11.9 million trees since their founding in 1984.
Plant With Purpose is currently present in more than 325 communities, providing aid and support to over 17,132 individuals within Burundi, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Tanzania and Thailand.
Location: Davi, Haiti
The Need: In Haiti, only 2 percent of its original forestry remains. Eighty-four percent of the population lives in poverty, and the country imports 60 percent of its food needs. Half of Haitian children under 5 are undernourished. With the help of Plant With Purpose, smallholder farming families are planting trees, implementing soil conservation methods and preventing soil erosion. Locals are educated on sustainable agriculture methods that restore the land and increase their food production and incomes. Village Savings and Loan Associations are also implemented.
Instead of providing food aid, Plant With Purpose is educating for self-sufficiency.
The communities in Davi are facing particular hardships. Floods and landslides cause destruction every rainy season, washing away the fertile topsoil and preventing farmers from growing crops. Families are forced to migrate to cities to find work. Plant With Purpose is working to reverse deforestation through its various methodologies.
Progress: Assisted families showed a 46 percent decrease in cholera and a 50 percent decrease in typhoid, compared with others. They also now actively save cash four times more frequently. They cultivate about 20 percent more land, own 30 percent more land and protect 20 percent more land through reforestation or erosion control.
These families also plant about three times as many trees as non-assisted local families.
Location: Panasawan & Pang Dang Nok, Thailand
The Need: The government of Thailand refuses to recognize many hill tribe members as citizens. Thus, they have few legal rights. They also have limited access to healthy fields, leaving them to grow crops on devastated hillsides. Plant With Purpose has been working with these communities to help them learn sustainable farming techniques and advocate for legal status in Thailand.
The village of Panasawan suffers from extreme poverty and a destroyed environment. Soil erosion, poor water quality and sanitation, difficult access to land rights and lacking availability of credit has ensnared the community in the cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. Plant With Purpose is providing farmers with environmental and financial training and economic opportunities necessary to break the cycle.
Progress: Hill tribe farming families are gaining access to land and basic rights. Village Savings and Loan Associations are providing a means to save and gain credit. Plant With Purpose is also helping congregations better meet the needs of their communities by training leaders.
Families aided now have twice as many children enrolled in high school, are 31 percent more likely to actively save cash, are 41 percent more likely to own land that is protected, have planted 2.5 times more trees, have shown a 19 percent decrease in admitted gambling and are 20 percent more likely to eat meat, eggs or fish on a daily or weekly basis.
Location: Lyasongoro, Tanzania
The Need: In Tanzania, Plant With Purpose mainly works with women, many of whom are widows or single mothers, because women and children there represent the poorest segment of the communities. Roughly 98 percent of these women who work earn through agriculture, but because they don’t have access to the same training their male counterparts receive, their yields suffer.
Plant With Purpose provides agricultural training, which doubles crop output, and plants over a million trees each year around Mt. Kilimanjaro. They are also establishing Village Savings and Loan Associations.
Progress: Assisted families showed a 65 percent decrease in diarrheal disease and a 70 percent decrease in typhoid incidence. It’s also true that 99 percent of these families actively save cash, compared with 48 percent previously, and 50 percent have enough savings to cover household expenses for six months, compared with 6 percent previously.
Of participant families, 80 percent own cattle, which is 42 percent higher than those not assisted, and 66 percent of participants earn some household income through microenterprise endeavors, a significant 43 percent higher than those who were not trained.
Location: El Café, Dominican Republic
The Need: While the Dominican Republic is gaining wealth, there is a growing gap between the rich and poor. The most impoverished, deforested regions exist near the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The Dominican government relies on Plant With Purpose to help with their reforestation programs.
El Café mainly profits off of its oregano crop, but recent deforestation threatens this trade. Plant With Purpose is helping to replenish the soil and diversify their economy. The organization has started a nursery, growing seedlings, fruit trees and other plants to replenish the forests and provide an additional source of income. Plant With Purpose has also provided a solar drier to villagers to convert their oregano into a marketable good. They are also offering workshops teaching sustainable farming and land conservation methods.
Progress: Families who work with the organization own twice as much land and protect 75 percent more land than non-participant families. These households are 60 percent more likely to own cattle as well.
Cacao, a valuable cash crop, is harvested 30 percent more often by Plant With Purpose farmers than other locals. Assisted families have planted almost three times as many trees than before.
Location: Kiremba, Burundi
The Need: In the world’s hungriest country, 80 percent of Burundi’s 8.5 million people live below the poverty line. At least 90 percent of Burundians depend on agriculture, but their farmland has been devastated by deforestation, drought, war and over-farming. Plant With Purpose is helping these farmers access land and maximize their productivity. They are also working with agriculture research institutions to provide disease-resistant crops. Through the introduced Village Savings and Loan Associations, villagers are saving their money and providing loans to others.
Progress: Plant With Purpose reports that 95 percent of farmers in associations have shared their knowledge with other farmers; each farmer shares with an average of 23.5 people. Participants are 24 percent more likely to save cash than non-participants, have planted three times as many trees as non-participants and have harvested 31 different crops, compared with 20 crops harvested by non-participant farmers.
Location: Tamazola, Mexico
The Need: In Oaxaca and Chiapas, two of the poorest states in Mexico, more than 75 percent of indigenous people live in extreme poverty. As men migrate to find work elsewhere, women are frequently left to care for their children and households.
Plant With Purpose is teaching families in rural communities to plant vegetable gardens that will increase their food production and incomes. Village Savings and Loan Associations have also been established to provide financial security and opportunity.
Progress: Plant With Purpose reports that participant households actively save cash 68 percent of the time, while non-participants save cash only 45 percent of the time, with participants being 43 percent more likely to have enough savings to cover six months of needs. Seventy-seven percent of participants own cattle, compared with 51 percent of non-participants, with the number of cattle owned by participants being twice that of the number owned by non-participants. Only seven percent of participant households have dirt floors in their homes compared with 29 percent of non-participant households. Participant farmers harvested 22 different crops, compared with eight by non-participants.
Plant With Purpose has seen measurable success from its efforts, objectively putting donations to good use. If seeking an effective, Christian-based charity that assists the poor on the ground, look no further. Personal contributions can be guaranteed to yield maximal benefit in the hands of this organization.
– Elias Goodman
Sources: Charity Navigator, Plan with Purpose, Scribd
Photo: New Identity Magazine
10 Quotes About Helping Others
Here is a list of 10 quotes about helping others, compiled by The Borgen Project:
1. “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. “Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.” – Booker T. Washington
3. “When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” – Maya Angelou
4. “Many small people, in many small places, do many small things, that can alter the face of the world.” – Unknown
5. “As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” – Audrey Hepburn
6. “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” – Charles Dickens
7. “Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.” – Helen Keller
8. “Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve…. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
9. “I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race.” – Voltaire
10. “No one has ever become poor by giving.” – Anne Frank
– Hannah Cleveland
Sources: GoodReads
Photo: The Motion Machine