Posted on
Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 11:45 AM
Category:
Disaster Relief
Kakoli Dey from CINI in Kolkata sends us this very recent information from the scene of devastation caused by Aila.
She asks everyone to tell their friends and family about the situation and asks for your generous donations.
Please keep in mind, as with all iGive projects, GiveIndia has not done any diligence on this project. CINI has met the Credibility Alliance norms.
Here is the report:
"Due to depression in the Bay of Bengal, a strong cyclone blew from south east. It created a massive surge of tidal waves rushing from the sea. In
some places the waves breached the mud embankments and over other stretches destroyed the embankment of ‘Maipith Island’ in Kultali Block of South 24 Parganas district in West Bengal bordering Bangladesh. It is inhabitated by 65,000 people. The saline water washed away the mud walls and foundation of the cottages of the poor.
Agriculture land mostly growing rice, vegetables and betel leaves are under 3 to 5 feet of ocean water. This will result in poor or no production of monsoon paddy crop and cash crop of vegetables and betel leaf. Almost all the ponds in the villages are flooded with salt water, which will lead to the fish being cultivated as being lost, and no possibility of reviving sweet water fish cultivation in future.
Four people have already died in the island, where CINI is directly working with more than 100 people injured. As the cyclone with tidal waves struck during daytime, villagers could run to the nearest safe and high ground such as local schools to take shelter. Livestock of cattle, goats, sheep and chicken were washed away by floodwater.
There is a strong possibility of outbreak of health hazards such as gastrointestinal diseases, respiratory illnesses in near future due to inadequate shelter and protection of the displaced population. About 20,000 homeless people have taken shelter in school buildings, 2 flood centres of Panchayat. CINI has already provided some dry food for flood victims along with local Panchayat and state government.
Details of damages where we work:
Deaths : 04
Injuries : Above 100
Houses fully damaged : 1500 (approx)
Houses partly damaged : 6000 (approx)
Ponds flooded : 8000 (approx)
Betel leaf cultivation destroyed : 600 units (approx)
Agricultural land under saline water : 8000 acres (approx)
Details of requirement for temporary relief and rehabilitation:
Dry food, food grains, baby food for 20,000 people (approx)
Medicines, ORS, Bleaching powder, Halogen tabs etc. for 20,000 people (approx)
Polythene sheets : 2500 pcs (approx)
Clothing,specially for children & women for 20,000 people (approx)
Beddings (including mosquito net) for 20,000 people (approx)
Permanent shelter arrangement for 2500 families (approx)"
Posted on
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Category:
Disaster Relief
According to a report in the Times of India, the death toll from Cyclone Aila has crossed 80 and the number of people affected is 4lac.
Of course, GiveIndia and our partner NGOs have been quick to respond. Child in Need Institute (CINI), a Kolkatta based NGO, has already set up an iGive page to raise funds for people affected by this disaster.
As we have done in the past, we will try to bring you news and photos from the field as soon as CINI sends us updates.
Posted on
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 7:10 PM
Category:
poverty in India
We forgot one day in our regular monthly post "How do you want to make a difference?" so thought we would talk about it now.
May 28 is the International Day for Women's Health and Reproductive Rights. Every women deserves access to medical care and deserves the right to make choices about her health, but so few women in India actually have that opportunity.
Moreover, a woman's health equals the health of her family. When a woman is sick, her entire family ends up paying the price, especially the youngest children who depend on her the most.
And if you want to do something to help a woman with little or no access to healthcare, here are some ideas.
Posted on
Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:16 PM
Category:
Giving News
Yes, that's exactly what we wished we were so that we could have buzzed into a top secret meeting of the world's top capitalists who are also leading philanthropists.
As the New York Times reports in its May 20, 2009 article "A Quiet Meeting of America’s Very Richest" the group included Bill Gates; Warren E. Buffett; Mayor Bloomberg; George Soros; the real estate developer Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe; Oprah Winfrey; David Rockefeller Sr. and his son David Rockefeller Jr.; Ted Turner; and Peter G. Peterson the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, the private equity firm.
The meeting took place on May 5, 2009 at Rockefeller University, but it took weeks before anyone noticed.
The New York Times said "Participants steadfastly refused to reveal details about the meeting, citing an agreement to protect the confidentiality of the discussion.
The participants have reputations as outsize philanthropists, and many have teamed up on causes. Mr. Buffet, for example, recently pledged to donate the bulk of his fortune, currently estimated at $37 billion, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Together, the men and women at the meeting had donated more than $72.5 billion to charitable causes since 1996, according to an estimate by The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
On Wednesday afternoon, the silence was finally broken when one of the participants, Patricia Q. Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Gates Foundation and current chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution, said the others had been concerned about privacy, not secrecy.
“Various members of the group have been talking about philanthropy,” she said. “This is a time when the needs are great. So it seemed like a really good time to get together.”
The event was jointly conceived by Mr. Buffett, Mr. Gates and the elder Mr. Rockefeller, Ms. Stonesifer said. “This was the first time this particular group had come together and shared a table,” she said, but added that with their charitable activities and general prominence, “the degrees of separation were few.”
The discussions centered on charitable giving, and participants talked about their personal causes, told of lessons they had learned, and suggested ways to improve and increase philanthropic efforts, Ms. Stonesifer said."
Posted on
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 4:14 PM
Category:
Fundraising
So here's the second part of our post from earlier this week. Again, to give credit where it is due, the article "Easier Said Than Done : 25 Random Things About Fundraising" is by Jeff Brooks, who is the creative director at Merkle and keeper of the Donor Power blog. The article appeared on the Fundraising Success website.
Most of the demographic and sociographic facts given here are from the book, “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism,” by Arthur Brooks.)
Read on.....
"17. Donors are all-around excellent people. They are significantly more likely than nondonors to give blood, help the homeless with food or money, give up their seats to others, give directions to strangers, or return mistaken excess change to cashiers.
18. Donors also are more tolerant and open-minded than nondonors. They are less likely to be prejudiced against members of other races and religions. Compared to nondonors, they have a more favorable opinion of all kinds of groups, including labor unions, big business, environmentalists, feminists, welfare recipients, Congress and the military.
20. The return on investment for charitable giving is $3.75 to the dollar. That is, for every dollar a donor gives to charity, she eventually becomes $3.75 wealthier. It’s not clear whether the dollar given directly causes the $3.75 return, but the correlation between the two is so strong and consistent that it’s obvious they are connected.
21. A dollar given to charity doesn’t just enrich the donor; it also adds more than $19 to the gross domestic product. That’s an almost unbeatable level of economic stimulus. Giving is patriotic!
22. Givers are more happy than nongivers. They’re 43 percent more likely to say they are “very happy.” Nongivers, on the other hand, are three and a half times as likely to say they’re “not happy at all.”
23. Givers are more healthy than nongivers. They are 25 percent more likely to say their health is excellent or very good than are nongivers."
Posted on
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 11:46 AM
Category:
Fundraising
We wanted to share some interesting facts about fundraising with you that we got from "Easier Said Than Done : 25 Random Things About Fundraising" by Jeff Brooks, who is the creative director at Merkle and keeper of the Donor Power blog. The article appeared on the Fundraising Success website.
Most of the demographic and sociographic facts given here are from the book, “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism,” by Arthur Brooks.)
The entire article is too long for our blog so we've edited it a bit. We'll bring you some more facts later this week in Part 2 of this post.
"1. The oldest recorded fundraising appeal was written by St. Paul around A.D. 55. It’s an appeal to a group of church members in Greece to help impoverished church members in Jerusalem. The appeal is a masterpiece of donor-centered fundraising, spending most of its words describing the benefits of giving.
2. Race and ethnicity are not good predictors of charitable giving. Age and sex, however, are strong predictors: Women give more than men, and older people give more than younger people.
3. Someone who regularly attends a house of worship is twice as likely to give to charitable causes as someone who seldom or never does. The churchgoer gives 100 times as much to charity per year — including 50 times as much to nonreligious causes.
4. Measuring by percentage of gross domestic product, the United States gives more to private charity than do any of the world’s nations. The U.S. is followed by Israel, Canada and Argentina. The most generous European nations — Spain, Ireland and the U.K. — give less than half of what the U.S. gives on a percentage basis.
14. The working poor are the most generous Americans, giving the greatest portion of their incomes to charity of all U.S. economic groups.
15. Wealthy Americans follow in generosity, giving slightly less than the poor do on a proportional basis.
16. The rest of us? We’re way behind. But there are so many of us that the bulk of charitable giving comes from middle-class donors."
Posted on
Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 8:39 AM
Category:
Inspiring Stories
Stephen King describes himself as "America's Bogeyman" which is a pretty apt title. As the 63 year old, prolific author of fictional horror novels that have sold more than 100 million copies across the world, he is a rather scary guy.
But as we recently discovered, he's a pretty philanthropic guy too. The following are excerpts from his 2001 Commencement speech to the graduating class of Vassar College.
"Of all the power which will shortly come into your hands—gradually at first, but then with a speed that will take your breath away—the greatest is undoubtedly the power of compassion, the ability to give. We have enormous resources in this country—resources you yourselves will soon command—but they are only yours on loan. Only yours to give for a short while. You'll die broke. In the end, it's the blink of an eye. I came here to talk about charity, and I want you to think about it on a large scale.
Should you give away what you have? Of course you should. I want you to consider making your lives one long gift to others, and why not? All you have is on loan, anyway. All you want to get at the getting place, from the Maserati you may dream about to the retirement fund some broker will try to sell you on, none of that is real. All that lasts is what you pass on. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
Don't I think wealth—and some of you are going to finish up very wealthy, although you may not think it now—should be kept in the family? Some, yes—charity begins at home. Those of you who have been able to pay for the college educations of your sons and daughters—their Vassar educations—have done a wonderful thing. It's a great gift. If you're able to go on and give them a further start in life—a place in business, possibly help with a home—so much the better.
But think about this picture. Imagine a nice little back yard, surrounded by a board fence. Dad—a pleasant fellow, a little plump, is tending the barbecue. Mom and the kids are setting the picnic table by the backyard pool: fried chicken, cole slaw, potato salad, a chocolate cake for dessert. And standing around that fence, looking in, are emaciated men and women, starving children. They are silent. They only watch. That family at the picnic is us, ladies and gentlemen; that back yard is America, and those hungry people on the other side of the fence, watching us sit down to eat, include far too much of the rest of the world. It's Asia and the subcontinent; it's countries in Central Europe where people live on the edge from one harvest to the next; it's South America; most of all it's Africa, where AIDS is pandemic—not epidemic but pandemic—and starvation is a fact of life.
Am I overstating? Well, America contains five percent of the world's population and uses up seventy-five percent of the world's resources, so you tell me. What we scrape down the kitchen disposal after Thanksgiving dinner for a family of eight would feed a Liberian village for a week, so you tell me. And the Woodstock Generation, which set out to change the world, has, by and large, subsided into a TV-driven existence of quiet and unobtrusive selfishness. While our national worth has tripled over the last quarter-century, the help we give the world's poor has sunk back to 1973 levels, so you tell me, you dare to tell me I'm overstating the case." In West Africa, the average lifespan is thirty-nine years. Infant mortality in the first year is fifteen percent. It's not a pretty picture, but we have the power to help, the power to change. And why should we refuse? Because we're going to take it with us? Please.
We may be dressed when we go out, but we're just as broke. Warren Buffet? Going to go out broke. Bill Gates? Going to go out broke. Tom Hanks? Going out broke. President Fergusson? Broke. Steve King? Broke. You guys? Broke. Not a crying dime.
Giving isn't about the receiver or the gift but the giver. It's for the giver. One doesn't open one's wallet to improve the world, although it's nice when that happens; one does it to improve one's self. I give because it's the only concrete way I have of saying that I'm glad to be alive and that I can earn my daily bread doing what I love. I hope that you will be similarly grateful to be alive and that you will also be glad to do whatever it is you wind up doing. Giving is a way of taking the focus off the money we make and putting it back where it belongs—on the lives we lead, the families we raise, the communities which nurture us.
When you go somewhere and sit down to break bread with your families, as most of you will, I want you to remember that image of the hungry and the dispossessed standing on the other side of the backyard fence. For the most part, they do not want to harm you, or take away your joy in this day; they only want what you want and we all want: food for themselves and their children, clothes for the body, a roof to keep the rain off at night. There are people who need these things right here in Poughkeepsie, as well as in India and Sierra Leone.
Right now we have the power to do great good for others and for ourselves. So I ask you to begin the next great phase of your life by giving, and to continue as you begin. I think you'll find in the end that you got far more than you ever had, and did more good than you ever dreamed."
Stephen King and his wife Tabitha support a range of causes and have their own Foundation that supports community based initiatives in their native State of Maine.
Posted on
Friday, May 1, 2009 at 9:54 AM
Category:
Donating
There are so many special days in May and so many ways to make a difference. Which of these days has special meaning for you?
May 1 - International Labour Day
On this day when we honour the workers of the world, let us also spare a thought for the unemployed. GiveIndia offers plenty of ways for adults to learn vocational skills that can help them find employment which leads to a steady income and improved quality of life for themselves and their families.
May 4 - 10 - Deaf Awareness Week
