The Girl Effect

This is a blog post that I wrote back in October of 2010, and for some reason, I never posted it to the blog!  Here it is, in all its delayed glory!

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I spent a huge portion of my life involved in Girl Scouts USA.  For those of you not in the United States, this is the same group as Girl Guides.  Growing up, we learned a lot of delightful things about how to be empowered women.  We learned about leadership and different skillsets that we could pursue.  We learned self-sufficiency and a whole host of wonderful ways to be a positive influence in the world.

Yet, after watching the videos at The Girl Effect, I am forced to recognize that not everyone had that kind of background.  Starting today, this page will be sporting the banner ad for The Girl Effect.  Their message is simple:  empower young women, and the whole world will benefit.

The simplicity of it makes it feasible.  There are so many humanitarian efforts out there that overcomplicate the issue of how to help others.  Even those who seemingly know that it's better to "teach a man to fish" rather than to just "feed him for a day", these same folks still often get it wrong.  How can we help?

As armchair philanthropists, many people feel the simplest way they can help is to write a check or swipe a credit card.  We don't all want to go to Bangladesh and get involved on a personal level.  And what this site is telling us is that we don't have to do that at all.  What needs to happen, they claim, is that we need to foster a situation in which teenage girls are encouraged to stay in school until at least 18 years of age.

There are myriad ways of making something like this happen.  Funding a school, providing school uniforms for students who can't attend because of an apparel requirement, micro-lending, etc.  These are just some random ideas off the top of my head.  And if you don't feel like going it alone, get a group together of people who feel that the women of the world are a worthy cause and pool your efforts.  It doesn't have to be anything formal.

Go watch the videos on the title link above (if you haven't already) and come back here.

Done yet?

Okay.

I'm going to make it easy for you to help others.  My blog is really about helping parents to raise their children in the best fashion they possibly can manage.  Parenting doesn't stop at your own children.  And who knows?  Maybe by helping children in other parts of the world, you'll have a net positive effect on your own child.  It could very well be that you manage to empower and inspire a young girl to grow to be a future world leader that does many great and wonderful things to improve the world.  And in the process, you can tell your child(ren) about the idea so that they can think globally as well.  And you can tell your friends, so that maybe they will be interested in being proactive as well.  And pretty soon, all those little efforts build up to great efforts with great effects.

How can you start?

Micro-lending is a fairly new phenomenon.  It helps people worldwide to afford to start small businesses.  Rather than just throwing money at a problem, you instead invest in someone who, in return, pays you back with interest.  Here are some places that do micro-lending:

NOTE:  I am in no way affiliated with these sites, nor have I personal experience in these particular ones.  They were what came up in a Google search.

Kiva: http://www.kiva.org/ "We are a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world."


Accion: http://www.accion.org/  "Accion's mission is to give people the financial tools they need--microloans, business training, and other financial services--to work their way out of poverty."

Prosper:  http://www.prosper.com/ "We want to connect people who want to invest money with people who want to borrow money."

And because I've focused on The Girl Effect, here are a couple other great links:

Women for Women: http://www.womenforwomen.org/index.php "Helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives."

Center for Effective Philanthropy: http://www.effectivephilanthropy.org/index.php "The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) provides foundations and other philanthropic funders with comparative data to enable higher performance." [Disclosure:  I have a friend who works at this company, and she LOVES her job.  What a great idea for a business!]

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So, apparently I hadn't posted this last October because I didn't have the links, so now they are there.  Enjoy!