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Fourth World Love Preserves Indigenous Villages

Fourth World Love
Fourth World Love defines the term “fourth world” as being exotic civilizations existing just beyond third world communities. Fourth World communities are usually located in obscure regions not typically visited by other people. These communities already have a set infrastructure they live by, but Fourth World Love works to help them keep up these unique infrastructures by supplying them with resources and innovative ideas and technologies.

 

Fourth World Love: Unique Development

 

The Fourth World Love organization was started by Misty Tosh and Lisa Colangelo who decided to create the organization in 2008 after filming a television show for the Travel Channel in Yelapa, Mexico. While there, they met people from a fourth world village who charmed them with their kindness and simplistic lifestyle. While filming, they noticed a crucial issue with their village; while they knew they had an established lifestyle, they realized they were not utilizing their resources to the best of their abilities. Tosh and Colangelo sought to help these people without tarnishing their beliefs.

Fourth World Love serves as a middleman for indigenous villages. They connect them with the resources and technology needed for villages to thrive without the technology conflicting with their lifestyles.

The members of Fourth World Love have worked on a variety of projects ranging from raising money through recycling to helping improve educational facilities in indigenous villages. One project raised enough money to provide a sanitation system in a village in Sembalum East Lombok Regency, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.

The sanitation system will give the village a public toilet that will help with waste management, and Fourth World Love will create the toilet out of recycled products. The Sanitation System will also provide residents with clean water for proper hygiene.

Another project enacted by Fourth World Love allowed members from their Community Development Center to build and expand schools in indigenous villages in Sembalun. With donations, they were able to add libraries, multiple classrooms and a common area for students to study and hang out in.

Volunteers for Fourth World Love help out with the Community Development Center in preparing villages for possible tourism, teaching them English and working on organic farms. Helping villagers start up their own businesses, working with the elderly and playing with children are also among the tasks completed by volunteers. Tosh and Colangelo, along with many volunteers, have traveled to multiple villages and continue to help them strive and be successful, and Fourth World Love will continue to empower communities through grassroots projects.

– Julia Hettiger

Sources: Fly For Good, Fourth World Love, Matador Network
Photo: Matador Network

New Goals for the Fourth World

 New Goals for the Fourth World
This past week, the UN considered a set of recommendations for reworking the Millennium Development Goals at their headquarters in New York. This time, however, a new group wants a seat at the discussion: the extreme poor.

The Fourth World, as it is called, has always been home to the population most at-risk and, unfortunately, the most difficult to help. Juan Baltazar, a former street-dweller in Bolivia and current development researcher, says he never knew about development efforts when he was homeless.

ATD Fourth World, an organization dedicated to studying and eradicating extreme poverty, compiled a report based on a three-year action-research program across twelve countries and involving over 2,000 men and women like Baltazar. Entitled “Towards Sustainable Development that Leaves No One Behind: The Challenge of the Post-2015 Agenda”, the report lists the five most important new development goals based on suggestions from the extreme poor. They are:

1. Leave no one behind: Fighting discrimination based on race, gender, and class is the most urgent need of those living in extreme poverty to access education, jobs, and so forth.

2. Introduce people living in poverty as new partners in building knowledge on development: The best way to assist the highly marginalized is to bilaterally share information and support to foster input and agency on their part.

3. Promote decent jobs and social protection: Policies that drive job-creation and fair social outcomes are essential to helping the poor help themselves.

4. Achieve education and training for all: Education must be relevant, equitable, and accessible to everyone in order to provide a firm social foundation for the “Fourth World.”

5. Promote participatory governance: Democracy is key to any sustainable approach to poverty alleviation, and the voices of the disempowered must be heard in order to help them effectively.

The report seeks to shift the emphasis in development from economic and health benchmarks to aligning policy with human rights standards. Pursuant to that, ATD believes that no real progress can be made without hearing the contributions of the poor themselves.

– John Mahon
Sources: Devex, ATD Fourth World
Photo: Amazonaws