Synopsis
Not long ago the New York Times ran a front-page article about child labor as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old African indentured servant. He lives far from his family and is roused from a dirt floor to work long, hard hours, dragging a heavy wooden oar nearly his own weight and paddling and bailing out the leaky fishing boat of his master, who deals out beatings but little food. I thought about every six-year-old I knew when, out of earshot of his master, the little boy whispered to the reporter, ''I don't like it here.''What was equally powerful was the response to the article, as readers wrote to the Times and expressed their frustration that the article didn't tell them what they could do to help. Wrote one reader who wept over the article, ''There are moments when there is value in simply feeling the deep pain of another's situation. But in an age when most of us ... already feel powerless about what happens in the world, a little bit of guidance toward action - anything to hang on to - would have been both kind and potentially helpful for all.'' Our Day to End Poverty: 24 Ways You Can Make a Difference is a book for all of us who know that there is poverty and suffering in our world and who want to know what we can do to help. This isn't a book to convince you to care about global poverty - we trust that you already do. This is a book for those of us who have felt hopeless or helpless - a book to show what each of us can do to make a difference. Our Day to End Poverty invites us to look at every day and begin thinking about poverty in new and creative ways. Inspired by the landmark bestseller 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, this book offers scores of practical, doable (although not always simple) actions anyone can take to help eliminate poverty....If we rise to the challenge, working together, one day six-year-olds across our globe may declare aloud, ''I like it here.''
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About the Author
Jeffrey Keenan has spent most of his vocational journey working in the personal computer software industry, beginning in 1986 with Aldus Corporation, the desktop publishing company which developed PageMaker. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has held various management positions within Adobe Systems' Global Supply Chain Management team, including a two year expatriate assignment to establish Adobe's Asia-Pacific supply chain base in Singapore, and most recently as the GSCM team's Strategic Initiatives project manager, leading Adobe's supply chain social responsibility initiative . He has spent those same twenty years nurturing and developing his family and volunteering for a variety of community service organizations. After four years of exploring, global poverty issues, Jeff is putting his resources behind this book which he fully believes will "move the needle for billions of people whose lives are negatively impacted by the limited (or non-existent) life opportunities." Shannon Daley-Harris, free lance writer, editor, consultant, and mother, lives in Washington, D.C. Shannon has authored Welcome the Child: A Child Advocacy Guide for Churches with Kathleen Guy, A Child Advocate's Concordance to the Holy Bible, Congregations Stand for Healthy Children, Putting Our Faith into Action, Say That I'm a Child of God, and numerous other publications, articles, and devotional and study guides. Over the past sixteen years in staff and consulting capacities she has served The Children's Defense Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Council of Churches, and other organizations addressing poverty, health care, and children's concerns. Prior to 1990 she taught children in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Trenton, N.J. Joy Anderson, President, and Jackie Vanderbrug, Managing Director, are with Criterion Consulting, a national firm that incubates and scales social ventures that make for a better world. Their work has shaped dozens of successful ventures ranging from health care initiatives for national church bodies at new collaborative models for local social service agencies. Their methodology and combined knowledge of the factors shaping the social sector and the breadth and depth of their relationships with current leadership, make them an invaluable resource for strategic endeavors that can reduce the prevalence of poverty today. Karen Speerstra, President, Sophia Serve, a coaching service to writers and publishers, is based in central Vermont. Author of Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart, and Earthshapers, and co-author with her son, Joel, of Hunab Ku: 77 Sacred Symbols to Balance Body and Spirit, after a career in book publishing, she now spends her time, coaching, reading, writing, editing, and gardening.
From the Back Cover
Imagine ending poverty at home and around the globe in our own lifetimes.
Imagine your actions combining with others' actions to make poverty
history. With originality and imagination this book invites us to look at
our very ordinary days, from waking up in the morning to going to bed in
the evening, and to begin to think about poverty in new and creative ways.
Our Day to End Poverty seeks to encourage readers that there is something
that each one of us can do, using our ordinary skills and resources, to
help end poverty. The book's challenges each of us with an immense
diversity of actions that we can take to really help eradicate poverty. It
connects with your day, from breakfast to bedtime. Each of the short
twenty-four chapters falls within one of three sections: Morning,
Afternoon, and Evening. Each section has eight chapters relating to common
daily routines. Think of them as pages from your daily organizer. Whether
it's planning for lunch or reading before bed, you may discover connections
between your day and the daily lives of people all around the world. This
book can help us all, for each of us is poor in many ways as well as rich
in many others. Our Day to End Poverty shows that whatever your bank
account or education, your age or political perspective, your experience or
skills, you can still make a difference--because making a difference isn't
a function of any one of those characteristics; it is a function of your
commitment and your hope, your willingness to take a risk and begin. One
day at a time. Anne Frank wrote during the Holocaust, "How wonderful it is
that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the
world." Let's get started. It is our day to end poverty.
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